Impresiónes de València 9

The València 9 meeting in Benidorm is now over, even for those who stay till the end of the party (!)… In retrospect, I found the scientific quality of this last meeting of the series quite high and I am thus sad this series comes to an end. This mythical gathering of “true believers” on a Valencianos beach town certainly had a charm not found in other meetings (even though I have no particular love of beaches, of beach towns or of cabarets) in that it brought people really together for a rather long time in an intense and sometime heated exchange of ideas. (This secluded perspective of course reinforced the caricatures of Bayesians as sectarians!) This was particularly true this time as the huge majority of people stayed in the same (awful) hotel. Also, the fact that there was no parallel sessions was a major factor to keep people together… (The fact that the afternoon sessions were administered by ISBA rather than the València 9 scientific committee had the drawback of sometimes producing similar talks.) In my personal view, there were somehow too many non-parametric and sparsity sessions/talks, but this follows the research trends in the community (after all in the 1994 meeting, there were also “too many” MCMC talks!) And the discussions from the floor were much more limited than in the earlier meetings (but most invited discussions were a clear added value to the talks). Maybe this is due to the growing Bayesian community. As in earlier editions, the poster sessions were a strong moment with the frustrating drawback of having too many posters in a single session to allow for a complete coverage (unless you were ready to stay up till 2am…) Again a consequence of the size of the audience. But it was a pleasure to see how Bayesian statistics was well and alive and how the community was bridging old-timers having attending all of the nine Valencia meetings with newcomers still writing their PhD. (Congrats to Emily Fox and to James Scott for their respective Savage awards!)

Darren Wilkinson also gives an overview of the “last Valencia meeting” on his blog. This post includes a detailed analysis of the GPU solution enthusiatically defended by Chris Holmes. Since I came back from the meeting with ideas towards parallel accelerations for MCMC algorithms, I will look carefully at his arguments.