In March 2016 over 100 friends, colleagues, students, and collaborators attended Statistical Inference under the Willskyan Lens, a symposium celebrating the exceptional career of Alan Willsky. The event was opened by Munther Dahleh (MIT) and featured technical talks by Roger Brockett (Harvard), Steve Marcus (University of Maryland), Nils Sandell (DARPA), Albert Benveniste (INRIA), Bill Irving (Fidelity), Martin Wainwright (UC Berkeley), Emily Fox (University of Washington), and Venkat Chandrasekaran (Caltech). This group, together with Al Oppenheim (MIT), who spoke at the symposium banquet, represent not only Alan’s intellectual impact on the field of information and decisions sciences, but also a community of researchers to whom Alan has been an instrumental collaborator and mentor.

The symposium was closed by Alan himself, introduced by LIDS director Asu Ozdaglar with thanks for his many years of leadership at LIDS. Alan’s talk covered some of the highlights of his career with a through line connecting the many people who helped, challenged, and inspired him along the way.

For more details about the symposium, visit: the symposium's website.