The first session of presentations I attended was a Kaleidoscope sessions, which purposedly shows a variety of packages and applicatoins of R-Project. So it came to be that I saw presentations on both actuarial science, dynamical systems, and spatial statistics. That’s again the beauty of an interdisciplinairy conference.

Normally, I would never have shown much interest in actuarial science, but it turns out that the presented Actuar package has a very nice function that is capable of estimating the characteristics of a theoretical distribution, when we have data which is left- or right censored (presented by Vincent Goulet). I will surely check this out and read some on the theory underlying it. I see some real nice applications in the quantitative sociology, for there we often encounter left- and especially right-censored data when analyzing life-courses.