Keynote 1 (Sunday 8th, 18:15-19:15)   Chair: Toshinari Kamakura

Education of the grammar of science for sciences and society

The objective of statistics education is not to make students understand application or theory of statistical methods but to give students the competence to advance modelling and decision making based on the grammar of science, which is a standard process necessary to acquire new knowledge or to achieve higher quality decision making. The author will illustrate simple cases for statistics education to clarify roles of different grammars of science both for sciences and societies.

Dr. Tsubaki is the president of the National Statistics Center that is in charge of editing and promoting the Japanese official statistics and has joined the work of revising the curriculum guidelines in mathematics of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and contributed to the adoption of statistical education strengthening policy since 2015.

He decided to become an applied statistician in 1975 because he was so impressed by Dr. Genichi Taguchi’s practical but poetical lecture of statistics in a freshman year at the University of Tokyo. Since being adopted as a lecturer in 1987, he has been involved in the activities of statistical quality control of production processes, new technology development experimental design, statistical reviewing of new drug applications and evaluating accuracy of environment measurements. He has been conducting problem solving education for business people at the Graduate School of Business Sciences of University of Tsukuba and several organizations.

As a domestic academic activity, he served as the president of Japanese Society of Applied Statistics, Japanese Society for Quality Control and Japanese Studies and Japanese Federation of Statistical Science Association. He is interested in connecting official statistics and academia as an applied statistician and contributes to dissemination of statistical methods as the grammar of science.

Keynote 2 (Monday 9th, 9:30-10:30)   Chair: Rob Gould

Cultivating Creativity in Data Work

Traditionally, statistical training has focused primarily on mathematical derivations, proofs of statistical tests, and the general correctness of what methods to use for certain applications. However, this is only one dimension of the practice of doing analysis. Other dimensions include the technical mastery of a language and tooling system, and most importantly the construction of a convicing narrative tailored to a specific audience, with the ultimate goal of them accepting the analysis. These "softer" aspects of analysis are difficult to teach, perhaps moreso when the field is framed as mathematics and often housed in mathematics departments. In this talk, I discuss an alternative framework for viewing the field, borrowing upon the past work in other fields such as design. Looking forward, we as a field can borrow from these fields to cultivate and hone the creative lens so necessary to the success of applied work.

Hilary Parker is a Data Scientist on the styling recommendations team at Stitch Fix, a personal styling service that uses a combinations of human stylists and algorithmic recommendations to help people find what they love. At Stitch Fix, she focuses on what sorts of data to collect from clients in order to optimize clothing recommendations, as well as building out prototypes of algorithms or entirely new products based on new data sources.

She is also a co-founder of the Not So Standard Deviations podcast, a bi-weekly data science podcast with Roger Peng that has over half a million downloads. Their topics of discussion include the R ecosystem, recent developments in the data science and statistics field, reproducibility and the “how” of how data scientists and statisticians work. Hilary recently authored the paper Opinionated Analysis Development based on discussions from the podcast.

Prior to her career in the tech field, Hilary received her PhD in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She lives at the San Francisco Zen Center with her partner, a Soto Zen Priest. In her free time, she enjoys exploring her home of 2 years, San Francisco.

Keynote 3 (Tuesday 10th, 9:30-10:30)   Chair: Katie Makar

See how the rest of the world lives, sorted by income

Imagine everybody in the world lives on the same street. The poorest live to the left and the richest, to the right. Everybody else lives in between. This is the Dollar Street, a revolutionary tool created by Gapminder to show how people live on different income levels. We use photos as data to show the differences and similarities in people’s lives across the world, sorted by income. When we look at the everyday lives of people, instead of the extraordinary shown in media, country stereotypes simply fall apart.

Together with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund founded Gapminder in 2005. Gapminder’s mission statement is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based world view everyone can understand.

She designed the user-interface of the famous animating bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, used by millions of students across the world, to understand global development trends. The tool was acquired by Google, and Anna worked at Google in Mountain View, CA as a Senior Usability Designer 2007 to 2010. At Google Anna improved search results for public data, developed data exploration tools for Public Data and made a bubble tool gadget (Motion chart) in Google Spreadsheets. In 2010 Anna came back to Gapminder to develop new free teaching material. Anna is now Vice President and Head of Design & User Experience at Gapminder. She also sits on the Gapminder Board. Anna holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Photography.

Anna founded Dollar Street, the biggest systematic image bank with representative home documentations based on data. At the moment we have almost 30,000 photos and 10,000 video clips, which are free to use under Creative Common license.

Together with Ola and Hans, Anna wrote the Factfulness book, launched in April 2018.

Keynote 4 (Thursday 12th, 9:30-10:30)   Chair: Prof. Jung Jin Lee

Through a glass darkly

To “see through a glass, darkly” (origin, 1 Corinthians 13:12) is to have an obscure or imperfect vision of reality. It is a great metaphor for realities underlying coming to know anything through statistics and, in particular, for looking backwards in order to look forward – as forecasting does. It is also a great metaphor for realities underlying statistical graphics and thus links the two parts of this talk. We begin by riffing on big issues related to the theme of the conference, looking backwards in order to look forwards and asking “How can we chart or way into a bright future?” Along the way we ask who we are, what part of the investigative landscape we occupy and who our neighbours are. We look at major trends we are currently caught up in, and at dangers and lessons arising from confronting “short termism” and “the future of work”. Since graphics provide the best hope for making serious statistical capabilities accessible to a wide cross-section of people, this begins a transition into a music-infused celebration of graphics in which we start with the plain, home-cooked fare that are our most basic graphics (dot plots, bar charts, and scatter plots) and start to add spices (other graphic elements) – each with its own theme tune – reducing the obscuring darkness of our looking glass by increasing what we can see through it. Links will be at http://bit.ly/icots10.

Chris (http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~wild) has been an academic statistician for 40 years. His focus his shifted gradually from statistical methodology and medical applications towards statistics education. He is probably best known to ICOTS people for his 1999 paper Statistical Thinking in Empirical Enquiry with Maxine Pfannkuch. His current passions are dynamic computer graphics as a means both for understanding data and for understanding concepts and statistical processes. He is working on software-enabled ways of speeding up the rate that students can experience and learn from a wide range of data types, and transitioning from a point-and-click system to coding in R. His most visible software projects are iNZight, iNZight Lite and VIT. He is the founding Director of CensusAtSchool NZ, a project that has operated for over 15 years to enrich statistics teaching in New Zealand, and has had long involvement with curriculum development – including the nascent International Data Science for Schools Project. Chris is a former President of the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE), and an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of New Zealand’s Science and Humanities Academy, the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Keynote 5 (Friday 13th, 9:30-10:30)   Chair: Prof. Yasuto Yoshizoe

Combining 360 degree reflections for looking forward

Looking back and analysing the past is crucially important in moving forwards in teaching statistics and in statistical education - individually, organisationally, nationally and internationally. For statistics, we must also look sideways, upwards and downwards, and bring these reflections and analyses together. This is not only because statistics intertwines with, and plays key roles in, almost all other disciplines, and across government, business, industry and society, but also because of the nature of statistics and its thinking. Capturing, allowing for, analysing, interpreting and communicating variability and uncertainty can often sit uneasily with the very human tendency to want answers, certainty and definite reasons. In addition, both the bad and good effects of research emphasis, whether in statistics, education or other disciplines, must be considered.

This presentation aims to identify and bring together some lessons from the past, from interactions with other disciplines, and across all educational levels. Just as we learn much about students’ needs from observing, listening, and reading their writings, so too we learn about the needs behind the wants of other disciplines, and of all those who teach statistics. Hence this presentation also aims to bring together lessons from students, from teachers and from authors’ submissions on teaching statistics. In the teaching of statistics, there can never be a single path or way forward due to the diversity and very nature of statistics. But sprinkled with advocacy from professional statisticians and statistics educators, and served with tolerance, understanding and authentic collaboration, such combinations may help throw light on the pathways forward.

Helen is only the second female, and second Australian, to be President of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in its 130 year history. She was a first Australian Senior Learning and Teaching Fellow, first female President and first female Honorary Life Member of the Statistical Society of Australia. She is Editor of Teaching Statistics, a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a past President of the International Association for Statistical Education.

Her work in teaching and curricula design across multiple disciplines, class sizes and educational levels received support through national awards and significant grants. She has published textbooks, book chapters, keynote, invited or refereed papers on authentic learning and assessment in statistics, quantitative learning support and statistical research interests in distributional properties. She is joint chair and editor of the Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics, and has been a member of the organising or editorial committees for many conferences, including a number of ICOTS. Helen has chaired reviews of university departments and centres across Australia and internationally, and has worked as a consultant on teaching statistics in Australia and the UK.

Her leadership roles over many years include founding and directing university-wide Maths Access Centres, Symposia in Statistical Thinking, and mentored developmental programs for tutors. Helen has played key roles in mathematics and statistics school education on curriculum, resources and assessment moderation. She has given many professional development workshops for teachers, and a variety of successful extension and enrichment programs for high school students.