The 2020 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium was originally scheduled to be held from May 17^th – 19^th, 2020, at Westin Galleria Houston, Houston, Texas. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Symposium was postponed to December 13^th – 16^th, 2020 and was hosted online. Despite many challenges that COVID-19 has presented, the 2020 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium was held very successfully. The department chair, Dr. Hulin Wu was the chair of the executive committee. The theme of the symposium was “Advancing Statistics for Data Intelligence”, and offered 9 short courses and 104 sessions including three keynote lectures, seven poster sessions, one student award session, and a Talent Show.

Even though it was challenging to host a virtual conference, the faculty and 30 student volunteers contributed a lot of time and effort towards making it successful - some students even gave us a hand during their final exam terms. We sincerely appreciate their hard work.

The conference was a great opportunity for our students to learn about the cutting-edge research and network with scholars from academia and industry. Our students Jing Zhang and Xinyue Qi won the poster award and paper award, respectively. In addition, the performance conducted by Xinyue Qi and Yi Yao won the platinum prize at the Talent Show.