The role of statistics in the modern economy has shifted to focus upon information technology applications, which include such applications as autonomous vehicles, large language models, computational advertising, and various kinds of constrained optimization problems.  The speakers and the discussant all work on topics in this new problem space.  

Hongxia Yang is the chief scientist on large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) at ByteDance, and she will speak about a new large language model that her team has developed.  Nathaniel Stevens is an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Waterloo.  He works on the application of design of experiments to the thousands of large-scale A/B experiments performed annually by companies such as Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn---these studies raise novel problems, such as contamination and the possibility for the same experimental unit to be exposed to two different levels of the same treatment, say on a phone and a laptop.  David Banks is a professor in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University.  He will take a broader perspective, and discuss autonomous vehicles, computational advertising, and the impact of these new technologies on society.  Roi Naveiro, the discussant, is an assistant professor at CUNEF University in Madrid.  He has done research on autonomous vehicles, adversarial learning, and high-end robotics.