As the development of economics and society in China, statistics displays new features of interdisciplinary, infiltration and integration across different disciplines such as Biomedicine, Economics, Management, Computer Science etc. The trend of the development of statistics is to use data as the foundation with the support from interdisciplinary knowledge and apply modern computer technology and mathematical theory to provide data analysis theory and methodology.

As the coming of big data era, the role of statistics becomes more important. Statistics plays a very significant role on the big data information mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition, statistics can provide methodologies for solving urgent demands in economics, finance, social security, biomedicine, industrial engineering and other fields. Although the big data brings great challenges for methods, computation and theory in statistics, it also gives great opportunities for the development of statistics. Hence, by this tide, the Academy of Statistics and Interdisciplinary Sciences has been founded by East China Normal University (ECNU). We expect that through establishing this academy, it can efficiently push forward the research and development of statistics. In the meantime, we expect that establishing this academy can promote the development of other disciplines in the faculty of economics and management of ECNU, including applied economics, business administration, management science and engineering; and further we can expand the application of statistics in other disciplines. Finally, we expect that the academy will become an international first-class academic platform for the communication of multi-disciplinary research activities.