Statistics Meets Friends: Nov, 29 -- Dec, 1, 2018; Göttingen, Germany

The conference "Statistics Meets Friends" was held in Göttingen from Nov. 29-th to Dec. 1-st, 2017, at the Alte Mensa of the University of Göttingen. It was organized by the members of the scientific committee Timo Aspelmeier, Thorsten Hohage, Stephan Huckemann, Andrea Krajina, Tatyana Krivobokova, Johannes Schmidt-Hieber and Frank Werner, on the occasion of Axel Munk's 50-th birthday under the motto "from biophysics to inverse problems and back", bridging the gap between mathematical statistics, inverse problems and biophysics, highlighting recent developments at their interfaces. There were approximately 100 participants and the conference featured 25 high quality invited talks by the following renown scientists:

Rabindra N. Bhattacharya on "Monotone random dynamical systems: Existence of steady states and convergence",  
Peter Bühlmann on "AAA", 
Tony Cai on "Rate-optimal perturbation bounds for singular subspaces with applications to high-dimensional data analysis",
Emmanuel Candès on "The likelihood ratio test in high-dimensional logistic regression is not a chisquare", 
Manfred Denker on "Improving statistical decision procedures",
Holger Dette on "Relevant change points in high dimensional time series", 
Lutz Dümbgen on "Simultaneous inference about features of densities and regression functions", 
Alexander Egner on "Optical nanoscopy and statistics: Towards the optimum resolution", 
Markus Grasmair on "Convergence rates for multiresolution based regularisation methods", 
Helmut Grubmüller on "Structure determination from single molecule X-ray scattering with three photons per image", 
Markus Haltmeier on "Compressed sensing and sparsity in photoacoustic tomography", 
Marc Hoffmann on "Nonparametric estimation of an inhomogeneous age-dependent model in a large population limit", 
Chris Holmes on "Probabilistic decision functions",
Hajo Holzmann on "Inverse problems in econometrics",
Thomas Hotz on "Statistics in circles", 
Zakhar Kabluchko on " Convex cones and statistics", 
Bernard A. Mair on "From positron emission tomography to potential theory and back", 
Enno Mammen on "Nonparametric estimation of locally stationary Hawkes processes", 
Victor M. Panaretos on "Nearly blind deconvolution of Gaussian processes", 
Richard Samworth on "Isotonic regression in general dimensions",
David O. Siegmund on "Detection and estimation of local signals",
Sara van de Geer on "On the asymptotic variance of the de-biased Lasso", 
Aad van der Vaart on "Credible sets for sparse models",
and Harrison Huibin Zhou on "Theoretical and computational guarantees on meanfield variance Bayes method for community detection".

Richard Nickl held the Ethel-Newbold-Price Lecture on "Efficient nonparametric inference for a nonlinear inverse problem with the Schrödinger equation" after which he was awarded the Ethel-Newbold-Price by Sara van de Geer. 
 
In a unique atmosphere, joining young students and researchers with senior world-leading researchers, generous breaks allowed for ample discussions, which, at a lavish conference dinner, were completed by shared anecdotes from Axel's scientific life, celebrating his jubilee.