PLS meetings for 2014

Posted on August 14, 2013

For those of you interested and working around the fascinating world of Partial Least Squares, you should prepare for next year’s (2014) meetings:

www.pls14.org

The 8th International Symposium on PLS and Related Methods (PLS’14), to take place on May 26th-28th, 2014 in Paris (France).

plsas.net

2014 PLS Applications Symposium to take place in Montreal, Canada from 30 May - 1 June 2014 (Friday - Sunday).

PLS 2014 meetings

Some of you already know about my involvement with Partial Least Squares (PLS) data analysis methods. For those of you who don’t, I must say that one of my research areas has to do with PLS stuff. Anyway, the important thing is that next year (2014) looks very exciting for the PLS community with two important meetings: PLS14 (Paris) and 2014-PLSAS (Montreal).

Both conferences are organized independently from each other. PLS14 can be said to be the traditional conference, being the 8th edition. It is open to the broad family of PLS methods, and related techniques. It encourages submissions related to Management, Social Sciences, Chemometrics, Sensory Analysis, Industry and Life Sciences including Genomics.

2014 PLS Applications Symposium is more limited than PLS14, focused on PLS-based SEM in general (i.e. PLS Path Modeling). It looks that PLSAS-2014 is more north-american based (although this is just my personal impression).

Personally, the fact of having two almost-parallel PLS meetings, reflects the success of PLS techniques, the interest among researchers, and its increasing popularity.

So which conference to go? It would be cool to go to both conferences but that looks extremely expensive. It’s hard to tell which one you should go. I guess the answer heavily depends on your budget, and also in your research area. To be honest, they are not cheap (at least if you are student). I wish both organizing committees would offer more attractive discounts or scholarships for students and young researchers. Both meetings seem good opportunities to know people in the PLS community, do some networking, and keep updated with the last trends and state-of-the-art.