The British Data Science Society has a long history. Our first meeting to set it up happened in 1964 (under the name Classification Society, which would later become British Classification Society, and now British Data Science Society - BDSS), and you can find the minutes here, first officers of the society were as chairperson Edmund Leach, secretary-treasurer John Gilmour and editor Peter Sneath.
In 1985 British Classification Society became a founding member of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS), organised the third biannual conference of IFCS in Edinburgh (conference chair David Wishart) in 1991, the International Classification Conference in St. Andrews (conference chairs Fionn Murtagh and David Wishart) in 2011 and the third annual European Conference on Data Analysis (ECDA 2015) - Data Science: Foundations, Methods and Applications - in Colchester (conference chair Berthold Lausen) in 2015.
We had constitution approved in 1985 (you can find it here), and then amended in 2002 (you can find the amendment here). The current version of the constitution was approved at the AGM 15th March 2024 at Goldsmiths College, University of London (you find it here).
If you are interested in our history, you may wish to take a look in the summary prepared by Prof. Hans-Hermann Bock (here).
The current committee (elected 2024 to 2027):
President: Prof. Berthold Lausen
Vice President: Dr. Daniel Stamate
Treasurer: Dr. Maged Ali
Secretary: Dr. Renato Cordeiro de Amorim
Former presidents:
Prof Fionn Murtagh (Honorary President since 2022)
Dr David Wishart (born 1943 in London, died 2020 Edinburgh - David Wishart Poster Award of the BDSS since 2022)
Dr Nick Fieller (born 1947 in London, died 2017 in Sheffield)
Prof David J Hand [IFCS president 2006 - 2007]
Dr Allan D Gordon (born 1945, died 2021) [IFCS president 1994 - 1995]
John Clifford Gower (born 1930, died 2019) [IFCS president 1990-1991]