A report on ISIPTA 2015

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Serena Doria
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The 9th International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications was held from Monday 20 to Friday 24 July 2015 in the Italian city of Pescara.

This conference was a result of the productive cooperation among the members of the Steering  Committee, formed by Thomas Augustin, Gert de Cooman, Enrique Miranda, Erik Quaeghebeur, Teddy Seidenfeld, and myself.  I wish to thank  the members of the Local Organizing Committee, Attilio Grilli, Mariangela Scorrano and Andrea Di Cencio for their valuable help and the Department of Engineering and Geology of the University G. d’Annunzio for its financial support.

As with previous ISIPTA meetings, there were only plenary sessions in the program. In total, 31 papers were presented by a short talk and a poster, and 17 additional posters were presented to introduce  preliminary ideas and challenging applications for which the research is not yet completed.

The contributions presented  a large number of new results in different  domains: decision making, statistical inference, belief aggregation, artificial intelligence, and stochastic processes, amongst others.

We were pleased to have three eminent invited speakers:

• Itzhak Gilboa, from Tel Aviv University and HEC Paris, proposed a unified model of inductive reasoning;
• Peter Williams, from the University of Sussex and BW Mining, reviewed the intellectual background for the development of coherent lower previsions;
• Massimo Marinacci, from Bocconi University, discussed approaches to model uncertainty in decision problems.

We were also pleased to have two tutorials to highlight specific subdomains of the wide field of imprecise probability:

• Barbara Vantaggi, from Universitá “La Sapienza” di Roma, gave a lecture on de Finetti’s work on coherence and its extensions to an imprecise context;
• Gregory Wheeler, from Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, taught us about the philosophical foundations of imprecise probabilities.

During the conference two sets of prizes were awarded: the Best Poster Award, sponsored by Springer and Wiley, and the IJAR Young Researcher Award, granted by the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning.

The winners of the IJAR Young Researcher Award were

Gold Award

• Jasper De Bock
• Denis Deratani Mauà

Silver Award

• Marco de Angelis
• Hailin Liu

Honorable Mention

• Georg Schollmeyer

and the Poster Award Laureates were

1. Gero Walter, Frank P. A. Coolen, Simme Douwe Flapper: System reliability estimation under prior-data conflict
2. Gero Walter, Christoph Jansen, Thomas Augustin: Updated network analysis of the imprecise probability community based on ISIPTA electronic proceedings
3. Erik Quaeghebeur, Chris Wesseling, Emma Beauxis-Aussalet, Teresa Piovesan, Tom Sterkenburg: Eliciting sets of acceptable gambles — The CWI World Cup competition (prize declined)
4. Julia Plass, Thomas Augustin, Marco E. G. V. Cattaneo, Georg Schollmeyer: Statistical modelling under epistemic data imprecision: some results on estimating multinomial distributions and logistic regression for coarse categorical data
5. Arthur Van Camp, Gert de Cooman, Enrique Miranda, Erik Quaeghebeur: Modelling indifference with choice functions
6. Julia Plass, Paul Fink, Norbert Schöning, Thomas Augustin: Statistical modelling in surveys without neglecting the undecided: multinomial logistic regression models and imprecise classification trees under ontic data imprecision
7. Fabio Gagliardi Cozman: Some remarks on sets of lexicographic probabilities and sets of desirable gambles

About the author

Serena Doria is researcher in Probability and Mathematical Statistics at the Department of Engineering and Geology of the University G.d’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Her research interests are coherent upper conditional previsions, Hausdorff outer measures, Choquet integral, fractal sets.