Dear fellow SIPTAns,
As you know, Thomas Augustin sadly passed away on January 10th.
Thomas was one of the founders of our society, being already present at the very first ISIPTA in Gent in 1999 and contributing decisively to the establishement of the society in 2002. From the very beginning, Thomas intensively supported the development of the society and the spread of imprecise probabilities. He contributed to and participated in every single edition of ISIPTA until the last ISIPTA 2025 in Bielefeld.
Many SIPTA members have paid their last respects on our memorial board for Thomas: https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/CHZiwhnm/ThomasAugustin and a flower wreath with a banner saying "Your friends from SIPTA" was placed at Thomas' grave (see attached photo) at the funeral. A printed version of the memorial board has now been handed over to Thomas' Family. Thanks to everyone who participated!
In order to pay homage to Thomas' legacy, the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR) is devoting a special issue to papers broadly related to his work and interests.
In particular, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Statistical inference with imprecise data and/or imprecise probabilities
- Decision making under severe uncertainty
- Machine learning with imprecise information
- Partial identification and analysis of deficient data
- Imprecise probabilities for survey- and official statistics
- Philosophical foundations and history of imprecise probabilities
- Imprecision and indeterminacy in probabilities in applied statistics
- Philosophical foundations and history of statistics
- Measurement error models with and without imprecise probabilities
Important Dates:
- Submission Open Date: May 15, 2026
- Submission Deadline: December 31, 2026
- Notification of Acceptance: June 30, 2027
Manuscripts must be submitted via the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning online submission system. Please select the article type “VSI: Memory of Thomas Augustin” when submitting your manuscript online.
All submitted papers under this call will undergo the standard review process of the journal. Further information can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/333213/papers-in-memory-of-thoma...
We look forward to this very special issue in honor of Thomas and hope it will serve as a lasting tribute to a remarkable scholar and dear friend of so many of us.
Kind regards,
Christoph, Georg, Rudi and Julian (guest editors)
