Starting with this issue, you will see a completely new ISBA Newsletter (NL), with a new Editor and, for the first time in its history, an Editorial Board. The NL is the result of the efforts of many people: Associate and Corresponding Editors (see their names in the last page), those who contributed a column to the issue, many of you who discussed a proposal for the ``new'' NL and gave valuable suggestions, the ISBA officers, my colleagues at IAMI, the staff at ISDS. I wish to thank all of them.

Now it is your turn. We are looking forward to receiving your comments and contributions to the NL. A section on Letters will be started as soon as we get any. Moreover, the Associate Editors will be happy to consider your suggestions for topics to be covered in future issues. I am looking forward to getting your feedback on the NL, suggestions and criticisms, proposals for new sections (e.g. Book reviews).

We would like the NL to become a valuable source of information and a place for discussion. Nowadays, news on conferences, prizes, etc. is spread very quickly through Internet. It makes little sense to have a NL focusing just on this type of information though we do plan to have a news section (News from the world), in which a short presentation of the facts will be followed by an e-mail or a web address. At the same time, we do not plan to become a scientific journal: this is not the purpose of a NL. We will though have a section on Bayesian History, where little known facts will be brought to the knowledge of a larger audience, stimulating, hopefully, further reading on those topics. In this issue Prof. Regazzini presents a little known paper on Bayesian nonparametrics by de Finetti.

The past, present and future of Bayesian statistics will be discussed by leading Bayesians in the section on Interviews: we start with Prof. Zellner; a quite natural choice as one of the founding members of ISBA!

Dissemination of Bayesian ideas is, of course, important. This starts from the courses that many of us are teaching. The section on Teaching will be a place where teaching experiences and tools are discussed. Dissemination is possible also if Bayesian methods are successfully applied to real problems: a section on Applications will describe some key Bayesian contributions.

The sections on Software and Bibliography should help researchers by pointing out new software and providing references on promising, but less well known fields.

We also provide a section for Bayesians of the future. A Ph.D. student is in charge of the Students' corner, where students can discuss issues of common interest. In this issue we present abstracts of Ph.D. dissertations discussed in 1998 at ISDS, Duke University. We encourage Departments to send us abstracts of their Ph.D. dissertations.
We would like to spread information about Bayesian activities in countries where the use of Bayesian ideas is a quite recent phenomenon: we start with Venezuela and we learn how the local Bayesian group started and grew.

We have not forgotten that our NL is the ``official newsletter'' of ISBA; thus readers will find news on the ISBA's activity too. In this issue, we start with the call for session organisers and papers for ISBA 2000, the 6^th world meeting of ISBA.

A final word about the NL and its Editorial board: the Associate Editors (AE) have been appointed for a two-years term (except the AE of the Students' corner who has to write his dissertation!), whereas the Corresponding Editors's term lasts one year to get a larger number of ISBA members involved in the NL. The NL will be published 4 times a year. In early messages sent to bayes-news and ISBA members, we asked people to tell us if they wanted the NL by e-mail. Because of the small number of answers, we have decided, for the moment, to mail the NL to all the ISBA members. In a future we might think again of an electronic delivery.

This issue is sent to all the Bayesians (and non Bayesians) who have requested it, regardless of their membership in ISBA. We hope that most of them will take the little step to fill the form at the end of the NL, turn it in to Prof. Valen Johnson and become part of ISBA (and get the next issues of the NL, as well ...)
Return to the main page