On behalf of the entire LIDS community, I would like to welcome you to the Fall 2016 issue of LIDS|All. Within these pages, you will find articles profiling some of our exceptional community members and learn more about the exciting events that took place over the past year. LIDS provides a dynamic and intellectually inspiring environment for all who call it home. It also continues on its growth trajectory. This year we added 4 new principal investigators to the lab: Professors Guy Bresler and Caroline Uhler, and more recently Dr. Kalyan Veeramachaneni and Professor Ali Jadbabaie. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome them to our community.

This has been a particularly important year as LIDS has joined the newly launched Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). LIDS faculty are playing a pivotal role in defining the new institute's intellectual agenda, leading the statistics effort and flagship projects (in finance, health analytics, social networks, energy systems, and urbanization), designing new academic programs in statistics and complex systems, and leading the search for new faculty in networks and statistics.

In this issue of LIDS|All, you will see that all of this growth has bolstered the opportunities for intellectual engagement in the community. For example, you will meet two of our senior graduate students, Swati Gupta and Hamza Fawzi and learn about their impressive research in online learning and optimization. Hamza is graduating this summer and will join the newly established Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information at Cambridge University as a lecturer in the Fall. We wish him the best in his new journey. You will also read about Roxana Hernandez, who recently joined LIDS administrative staff and has immediately added so much to our community with her warm personality and dedicated work. There is an interview with Luca Carlone, recently promoted to a LIDS Research Scientist, who talks about his work on mobile robotics. You will also find interviews with two of our PIs, Professor Alan Willsky, sharing his wisdom on research in the broad area of control, estimation and signal processing and milestones of his impressive career, and Dr. Suvrit Sra talking about his exciting research on parameter estimation for Gaussian mixture models. You will also hear from LIDS alum Dr. Noah Stein, who is currently a Senior Research Scientist at Lyric Labs.

LIDS has always been a special place both as a world-leading center for foundational work in information and decision sciences, and as a rich and supportive environment for its members. With so many new directions and accomplishments, its future looks as vibrant as ever. I feel privileged to be part of this exceptional place and I hope this issue of LIDS magazine provides you a glimpse of why.

Sincerely,
Asu Ozdaglar