The Society for Imprecise Probabilities:
Theories and Applications

A brief report on ISIPTA 2011

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Enrique Miranda
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The 7th International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications was held in the beautiful city of Innsbruck (Austria), on July 25—28, 2011. It was organized by Frank Coolen, Gert de Cooman, Thomas Fetz and Michael Oberguggenberger, with the help in the local organization of Anna Bombasaro, Bernhard Schmelzer and Reinhard Stix.

A total of 40 papers dealing with theoretical and practical aspects of imprecise probabilities were presented, both with a poster and with a short talk.

Moreover, and continuing with the tradition started at the ISIPTA’09 conference in Durham, poster-only presentations were made of papers presenting novel ideas and applications whose research was not yet completed.

On Monday July 25 the ISIPTA General Meeting was held and the new Executive Committee was appointed. The continuing president, Teddy Seidenfeld, acknowledged the work of the salient members, and particularly of the outgoing secretary, Erik Quaeghebeur. A report on that meeting is available here.

In addition to the presentations, a special session was devoted on Tuesday 26 to Bruno de Finetti, who was born in Innsbruck in 1906, as a commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the publication of the famous “De Finetti theorem”. This session had the participation of Fulvia de Finetti, Bruno de Finetti’s daughter, who gave a historical account of Prof. de Finetti’s life; Paolo Vicig and Teddy Seidenfeld, who discussed Bruno de Finetti’s ideas on imprecision; Gert de Cooman, who presented some results extending De Finetti’s work on exchangeability to the imprecise case; and Reinhard Viertl, who discussed both De Finetti’s relationship with Austria and the connection between his work and fuzzy probability distributions. After the session, the ISIPTA’11 participants gathered at de Finetti’s birthplace were a memorial tablet in his honour was unveiled.

Wednesday 27 was also the day of the gala dinner, that took place at the Seegrube restaurant, and where the IJAR Young Researcher Awards were given. The recipients were Bernhard Schmelzer (Gold Award), Rebecca Baker, Nathan Hunley, Gero Walter, Richard Crossman and David Sundgren (Silver Award) and Mohamed Boujelben, Jasper de Bock and Gerardo Simari (Honorable Mention).

Finally, on the last day of the conference three interesting tutorials on engineering applications of imprecise probabilities were given by Alberto Bernardini, Fulvio Tonon and Michael Oberguggenberger. And, last but not least, during the closing ceremony the Best Poster Award was given to the poster by Manuel Eugster, Gero Walter and Thomas Augustin, entitled A Network Analysis of the Imprecise Probability Community based on ISIPTA Electronic Proceedings with a mention to the posters by:

We believe that the ISIPTA’11 conference continued the success of the previous conferences, and we would like to thank both the organizers and the participants for having made this possible through their efforts.