The conference is organized by Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (September 9-13, 2019, Tbilisi, Georgia),
and will be held at 1 Ilia Chavchavadze Ave., Build. 1.
           Participation in the conference is by invitation only. Talks should be aimed at a broad audience, include good
heuristics, and also be accessible to graduate students and postdocs with solid background in statistics and
probability theory. Talks presenting interesting data applications are welcome as well.

Professor Estate Khmaladze

          Outstanding mathematician and statistician, Estate Khmaladze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 20, 1944. He graduated with BSc in Physics and MSc in Applied Mathematics from I. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University in 1966, and he earned his PhD in mathematics in 1971 and Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1988, both from M. Lomonosov Moscow State University.
       From 1972 to 1990 he held positions at A. Razmadze Mathematical Institute, the leading research institute in mathematics of the Georgian Academy and interim positions at V.A. Steklov Mathematical Institute of Soviet Academy, one of world centers of mathematical research at that time. From 1990 to 1999 he served as a head of the Department of Probability and Mathematical Statistics of A. Razmadze Mathematical Institute. From 1996 to 2001 he worked at the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of New South Wales. Since 2002 he is Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics of Victoria University of Wellington. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2015 he was awarded the I. Javakhishvili Medal, the highest honor from Tbilisi State University, and in 2016 was elected the Foreign Member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences.
       The work of Estate Khmaladze is characterized by extraordinary breadth of interests, and unexpected discoveries of new unusual solutions to statistical problems, found in parts of mathematics distant from statistics. Such is, for example, his work which resolved the problem, staying open for over two decades, and which now forms the foundation of the modern theory of distribution free testing. Another example is his work on new derivatives of set-valued functions, the work acknowledged by the outstanding mathematician of our time, J-P. Aubin. The new approach to the occupation problem, developed by E. Khmaladze, connects statistical problems of diversity and occupation problems with almost alien to it, the theory of infinite divisibility and subordinated processes.
       Recently, Estate turned again to the theory of distribution free testing, this time coming up with unusual connection of empirical processes and unitary operators. The approach promises to extend into many branches of testing theory: from parametric hypothesis testing to classical linear regression, and from models for point processes to Markov chains.