Advancing the Frontiers of Earthquake Science: Fifth International Workshop on Statistical Seismology, Erice, Sicily, Italy, 31 May to 6 June 2007

Statistical seismology has been emerging as a new discipline at the interface between earthquake physics, earthquake statistics, hazard assessment, and society. A workshop in Italy was sponsored by the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), and the Japanese Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM), to discuss the state of the art and future directions. Conference participants discussed how to use available tools and techniques of statistical seismology to advance earthquake science. Building increasingly accurate timedependent earthquake forecast models at various spatial and temporal scales is widely recognized as an important challenge, and various such models were presented and discussed at the workshop. Exploiting time dependence for hazard assessment requires us to develop a detailed understanding of the behavior of regional fault systems and corresponding earthquake catalogs spanning decades. We can no longer analyze individual faults or earthquake sequences in isolation.