Report Date / 01/Jun/2016
Report Author(s) / Zdeněk Valenta
Subcommittee Start date / Aug/1996
Chair / 1. Zdeněk Valenta (CZ), since Mar/2011
Secretary / 2. Anca Vitcu (RO), since Mar/2011
Members / 3. Tomasz Burzykowski (BE), since Aug/2013
4. Gordana Jovic (UK) since Aug/2009
5. Stanislav Katina (UK) since Aug/2009
6. Arnošt Komárek (CZ) since Mar/2011
7. Zsolt Lang (HU), since Aug/2012
8. Chris Metcalfe (UK), since Aug/2012
9. Hein Putter (NL), since Aug/2014
10. Kinga Sałapa (PL), since Aug 2015
11. Laszlo Tothfalusi (HU), since Aug 2015
12. David W. Warne (CH), since Aug 2015
Terms of Reference
1. To help those interested in forming a National Group through the approval process.
2. To review the arrangements with the current National Groups.
3. To set rules and standards for funding of ISCB members of National Groups and others from countries with exchange control restrictions or barriers.
4. The Subcommittee administers the Conference Awards for Scientists for the annual ISCB meetings.
Report
Overview
The ISCB National Groups (NatG) Sub-Committee (SC) oversees the work of the National Groups established within the ISCB. It is also keen on promoting clinical biostatistics to more countries underdeveloped in this scientific discipline. The following is a list of countries currently represented through the National Groups of the ISCB, along with their respective websites (when appropriate):
• Czech Republic: http://sites.google.com/site/iscbcr/home/
• Hungary: http://efabis.univet.hu:8080/biostat/
• Poland: http://www.iscb.pl/
• Romania: http://iscbrng.vv.si/
• Serbia: -
Seminars, Courses, Conference Organisation
The Czech NG: (report by Zdeněk Valenta)
The Group currently involves 44 biostatisticians from around the country, 1 member resides in the neighbouring Slovakia and 1 practices in Germany (she therefore also pays the dues in Copenhagen). The current NG representatives with valid mandates until Sept 10, 2018 are the following: Zdeněk Valenta (chairman), Marek Malý (vice-chairman) and Jindra Reissigová (treasurer), Jan Kalina serves as an internal auditor of the Group. The Group was first officially registered in the Czech Republic by the Czech Ministry of the Interior on 11th Sept 2006. On 27th November 2015 the Group completed a new registration under a recently introduced legal form of ‘registered association’ (previously a ‘civic union’), both referring to non-profit organisations.
The list of Groups activities since last Annual ISCB conference in Utrecht follows. On 30th September 2015 the Group organised a seminar with Barbora Peštová from the Dept. of Probability and Mathematical Statistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague. Her presentation was entitled ‘Testing Structural Changes Using Ratio Type Statistics’ and focused on change-point analysis using ratio type statistics.
On 31st March 2016 the Group welcomed Patrícia Martinková from the Dept. of Medical Informatics & Biostatistics at the Institute of Computer Science AS CR in Prague. This contribution was entitled ‘Testing for Moderators of Inter-Rater Reliability in Complex Settings As It Applies to Selection Instruments’ and focused on estimating inter-rater reliability in organizational research settings.
On 21st April 2016 the next speaker was Marek Brabec from the Dept. of Non-linear Modelling at the Institute of Computer Science AS CR in Prague. His lecture was entitled ‘Semi-parametric model of the occurrence of asthmatic symptoms dependent on the state of the air pollution’. Both static and dynamic variants were introduced using the GAM class of models with various forms of penalties reflecting different approaches to analysing the data.
On 27th April 2016 the Group welcomed Martin Otava from the Dept. of Nonclinical Statistics and Computing, Janssen Research & Development, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Turnhoutseweg 30, B-2340 Beerse, Belgium. His lecture was entitled ‘Bayesian methods used in the pharmaceutical development’ and contrasted the use of predictive or tolerance intervals with the Bayesian analysis directly estimating the target distributions.
On 5th May 2016 Stanislav Katina from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at Masaryk University in Brno presented a contribution entitled ‘Modeling risk of orthopedic implant failure using kernel estimation’, focusing on the Cox proportional hazards modelling with the use of kernel smoothing.
As has now become a tradition, the Group will organise one international course in 2016. We are extremely delighted to announce that the Group will once again have an honour of welcoming in Prague Prof. Stephen Senn, the head of the Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics at CRP-Santé in Luxembourg. On Friday 27th November 2016 he will give a one-day course entitled ‘An Introduction to Statistical Issues in Drug Development’. More details may be found at the website of the Czech NG listed above.
Polish NG (report by Ewa Kawałec, Krystyna Szafraniec, Alicja Cicha-Mikołajczyk, Kinga Sałapa)
The Polish National Group of ISCB consists of 94 registered members (update for 15.06.2016). Seven young scientists, including two PhD students joined our group this calendar year.
The members of PNG come from all over the country, so full-day scientific meetings are scheduled twice a year (usually in Krakow in June and December). Presentations concerning recent applications of statistical methods in different areas of biomedical research are usually given by our members and sometimes by invited scientists.
The December 2015 meeting was organized by our members from Warszawa in the Institute of Cardiology. The place of the meeting (in central Poland) was chosen to allow members attend in easier way the General Assembly. The first part of the meeting was scheduled for scientific presentations; lectures on “Perception of illness and coping with risk factors in IHD patients” and “Novel SES modelling procedure. Evaluation of SES differences in lung function in adults” were given by Dr. Renata Wolfshaut-Wolak (epidemiologist) and Maciej Polak (Msc in Mathemathics, biostatistician). Then the General Assembly took place with the agenda including:
- the approval of the annual reports prepared by the PNG Representative Dr. Ewa Kawalec
- voting for a new board; the new board is composed of myself (Krystyna Szafraniec, PhD) as President, Alicja Cicha-Mikołajczyk, PhD, as vice President and Kinga Sałapa, MSc, as Treasurer
- voting for increasing of membership fee from 40 to 50 PLN; it was approved
- a preliminary discussion on proposition to take advantage in organizing the annual ISCB conference in Krakow, scheduled for the year 2020 or later
- considering to organize a two day ISCB workshop in Krakow planned for 2016.
The next regular scientific meeting is scheduled for December 2016. In the meantime a workshop sponsored by ISCB is to be held from 22-23 of September 2016 in Krakow. The workshop will be devoted to “Causal inference” and the lectures will be given by Stijn Vansteelandt, Professor of the University of Ghent.
The homepage of PNG: www.iscb.pl (in Polish) contains information about conferences, seminars, courses and current activities of the Group.
Hungarian NG (by Júlia Singer, Krisztina Boda and Peter Vargha)
Currently 52 members, established in 1992. NG Representatives: Júlia Singer (chairwoman), Krisztina Boda (vice-chairwoman), Peter Vargha (treasurer).
We successfully applied for ISCB support for a short course to be held at 14-15 October 2016 in Budapest. The course entitled “Statistical Issues in Drug Development” will be delivered by Stephen Senn.
We continued with our regular group meetings with lectures given by members as well as by invited speakers. Seven members of our group took part in the ISCB conference in Utrecht, in August 2015, with 5 poster presentations. On the 12th of February 2016 we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the foundation of our national group. For this event we invited also our former members (more than 100 members in total these years).
This year there were no applications for the award called “Young biostatistician of the year”.
General meeting on the 20th of May 2016. Decisions of the general meeting: From next year the membership fee will be increased as follows (amounts are rounded to Euros): full membership fee 10 Euros, student membership fee 5 Euros, and no fee for retired members (2 persons in our group). Elections will be held in each 3 years, and the next elections will take place next year.
Romanian NG (by Anca Vitcu)
A virtual round table addressed on project, program and portfolio management is planned for October 2016. It is a three-part series where we bring together well-known experts from healthcare and computer science to share their best ideas, strategies and practices on clinical research, public health informatics, consumer health informatics and translational bioinformatics. The event will be organized by the RNG in partnership with the Faculty of Computer Science ("Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi).
More information will be available on RNG webpage.
Serbian NG (by …)
2016 CAS Awards
The ISCB National Groups Subcommittee (NG SC) received a total of 10 eligible applications for the Conference Awards for Scientists (CASc). The applicants represented the countries of Bangladesh (2), Hungary (2), Nepal (2), Pakistan (1), Poland (2) and Turkey (1). The SC appears to be moving in the right direction by attracting the applications from mostly non-NG countries.
All twelve NG SC members took part in the evaluation process this year which we believe contributed to an overall fairness of the selection process.
The SC members provided the assessment of each application by assigning the grades between 1 and 5, with the high scores reflecting excellence and low ones suggesting a rather poor quality of submission. The NG SC members were also asked to express explicitly in words whether in their opinion the scientific contribution qualified the applicant for receiving the CASc award (YES/ NO).
This year the National Groups Subcommittee decided to grant three ISCB CASc awards. The highest score earned the submission by Iveta Selingerová from the Czech Republic. Her winning contribution was entitled ‘Kernel estimation as alternative to (semi)parametric models in survival analysis: simulated and real data’ and earned 49 points out of 60 possible.
The second winning application by Iftakhar Alam from Bangladesh was entitled
‘A comparison between the continual reassessment method and D-optimum design for dose finding in phase I clinical trials’ and earned 48 points.
The third CASc winner, Hasinur Khan, comes also from Bangladesh. His contribution was entitled ‘On The Performance of Adaptive Pre-processing Technique in Analysing High-dimensional Censored Data’ and earned 47 points in total.
The group of three winning applicants achieved distinctively higher total scores as compared to the remaining seven whose highest score was 10 points below the 3rd ranking or more. This is why this year the SC had no problem in identifying the winning CASc applicants.
The three winning papers will be presented by their authors at contributed sections of the ISCB 2016 in Birmingham, U.K. The winners are entitled to receiving a free registration to the Birmingham Conference, a free accommodation, one free short course of their choice, a free-of-charge attendance at the Conference Dinner, as well as full travel support.
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