2023 Annual Meeting

2022 Annual Meeting

The 2022 Classification Society annual meeting was the first full length meeting of the Classification Society since June 2019. The meeting was organized by Xu (Sunny) Wang at Wilfrid Laurier University. The 2022 meeting featured a complete program that included 3 contributed speaker sessions, 3 invited speaker sessions, a student poster session, and multiple invited lectures and sessions. Highlights of the event included the President’s invited address given by Paul McNicholas (McMaster University) which discussed model-based clustering approaches for multivariate longitudinal data, approaches for 3-way data that do not assume normality, and an approach for 3-way data that are high dimensional. The invited address given by Daniel Aloise (École Polytechnique de Montréal) who discussed a method to provide scores to must-link and cannot-link constraints that are beneficial in semi-supervised classification. The invited session on Psychometric Methodology featuring Hans Friedrich Koehn (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Kim de Roover (Tilburg University) that discussed and gave examples of the value of classification methodology within psychological research. The invited session on advances in model-based clustering approaches featuring Alex Sharp (University of Waterloo), Jeff Andrews (University of British Columbia | Okanagan Campus), and Rebecca Nugent (Carnegie Mellon University) that covered topics in model development, model assessment, and applications to education data. The invited session on applications in biostatistics featuring Lucy Gao (University of British Columbia) that discussed inference for hierarchical clustering. And three invited sessions celebrating the accomplishments of outstanding doctoral students studying clustering, classification, or related areas of data analysis, encompassing associated theory and/or applications. Usually, each meeting of the Classification Society features the winner of that years distinguished dissertation award (https://www.theclassificationsociety.org/distinguished-dissertation-award/). However, due to the travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 annual meeting featured the winners of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 competitions. The three winners were Keefe Murphy (Maynooth University), Michael Gallaugher (Baylor University), and Francesco Sanna Passino (Imperial College London), respectively. In these sessions, a variety of different topics were discussed e.g., the development of families of parsimonious models for model-based clustering, bi-clustering, and model selection in spectral graph clustering.

2021 Annual Meeting

The 2021 annual meeting of The Classification Society was held at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, from Friday, November 5 to Sunday, November 7, 2021. The meeting was organized by the president of The Classification Society, Abby Flynt. The scientific programming committee was comprised of Abby Flynt (chair), Brian Franczak, Meredith Wallace, and Tanzy Love.

On Friday evening, the CS annual meeting kicked off with welcoming remarks from the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Karl Voss and the CS poster session featuring Yida Chen, Jiawan Zhao and Abby Flynt from Bucknell University, Ji Ah Lee and Harsh Vardham Dubey (University of Masschusetts Amherst), Hung Tong (University of Alabama), and Brian Franczak (MacEwan University). Saturday featured a full day of presentations that included the President’s invited address on the influence of statistical machine learning in informing admissions into American colleges given by David Hunter (Penn State University), two talks on applications in clustering and classification given by David Banks (Duke University) and Rachael Hageman (University of Buffalo), an invited lecture on Geometric Morphometrics given by F. James Rohlf (Stony Brook University), an invited lecture on dependent Bayesian nonparametric modeling of compositional data by Andres Felipe Barrientos (Florida State University), and three contributed talks by Tanzy Love (University of Rochester), Michael Kane (Yale School of Public Policy), and Meredith Wallace (University of Pittsburgh). Sunday featured a half day of talks that included three invited talks on Classification and Psychometric Methodology given by Samrachana Adhikari (NYU School of Medicine), Teague Henry (University of Virginia), and Susu Zhang (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and three contributed talks by Cristina Tortora (San Jose State University), Thiago Serra (Bucknell University), and Brian Franczak (MacEwan University).