The Channel Network Conference is a biennial conference organized by the IBS regions; Belgium, France, Great-Britain/Ireland and the Netherlands. This conference aims at gathering statisticians to discuss the newest statistical methodology for the analysis of biological and medical data. It is a 3-day conference with short courses, invited and contributed sessions. Usually, around 150 researchers from both academia and industry participate in the conference. In 2021, the French region will host the conference at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris (CNAM).

We are proud to announce that Jeanine Houwing-Duistermaat (University of Leeds, School of Mathematics, Statistics Institute) and Mathias Drton (Technical University of Munich, Department of Mathematics, see here for a short biography) will be the keynote speakers. In addition we will have three Invited Sessions:

• Integrating and analyzing data from different sources (Data Integration)
• Statistical modeling in movement ecology
• Infectious diseases

Participants will additionally be able to choose one of three short courses:

• Practical deep learning with R (S. Keydana, Rstudio)
• Adaptive group-regularization in prediction (M. van Nee, M. Münch and M. van de Wiel, Amsterdam University medical centers, Department of Epidemiology and Data Science)
  
• Non-parametric Bayesian methods for classification (B. Hejblum and A. Rouanet, University of Bordeaux)
  

As for all IBS conferences, contributed abstracts, for both oral and poster presentations are welcome across the wide range of biological and biomedical application areas pursued by society members, and associated with the diverse array of methodological topics required to address the challenges that these application areas bring, and not just associated with the invited programme topics. A list of common topics is provided within the online abstract submission system.

Prizes will be awarded to best student oral presentations and also best poster presentations. These will be presented at the conference dinner.

Important Dates and Deadlines

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 January 2021

Notification of contributed abstracts: 20 February 2021

Early Bird Registration: 10 March 2021

Registration Deadline: 25 March 2021