MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
I would like to start my first column as President with a BIG THANK-YOU to Nalini: she did a superb job in her two years of Presidency and I will try my best to follow her path, counting a lot on the help of the ISBIS officers and members.
I just came back from the ISI 2019 World Statistics Congress (WSC) and I can tell how vibrant and effective our Association is. We (actually, Martina Vandebroek, WeeYeap Lau, Nalini Ravishanker and Toh Hock Chai, with different roles) did a great job in organizing ISBIS 2019 which attracted many participants, mostly from Malaysia and neighboring countries (some funded by World Bank funds and some from our own). We are very thankful also to our continuing sponsors (Cogitaas and TriloByte) and the local organizations (first of all, Bank Negara Malaysia which hosted the event and then the Department of Applied Statistics, Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya and the Malaysian Economic Association). The plenary speech by Galit Shmueli was very stimulating and the course by Nalini and Balaji Raman (Cogitaas, India) was very well attended. The only negative (personal) aspect is that I missed all of it because of my commitments with ISI (I am Vice President) and my report is based only on what I heard from the participants. But I will be at ISBIS 2020 on July 28-30, 2020, at Brock University, Canada (mark your calendar)!