MCMSki 3 [recollections]

I am now back home after five exciting and exhausting days in Park City, Utah! As reported earlier, the Adap’skiii meeting went on quite well, with high quality talks relating to edge research. I am thus completely committed to organise the next meeting in three years or so, whether or not MCMSki 4 ever takes place. I also found the ski resort where the meeting took place quite interesting, with plenty of mostly empty ski runs and top quality lodging [with the luxury of a fireplace]. (The downside was a type of runs I was not used to in the Alps, but this showed how far I had to improve in my skiing. And another major downside were the grossly overpriced commodities, because down-town Park City was too far to accommodate my jet-lagged schedule. Despite this lack of complete information, I am slightly bemused at Park City making into the top ten places to go in 2011 according to the New York TImes…) While the picture below, taken from my hotel room/flat, was selected as Shot of the Day by The Canyons, the above panorama picture was provided to me by Luke Bornn, who also gave a fairly interesting talk during the Young Investigators session.

This was actually one of the most exciting sessions of MCMSki 3 in my opinion (acknowledging for a possible bias against the afternoon sessions due to my schedule. Poster sessions were off-base as well since starting after my bed-time! Judging from the abstracts I certainly missed an important chunk of the conference… To wit, Pierre Jacob got one of the poster prizes for his poster on our parallelisation paper.) As I left early, I am sorry I missed Keith Baggerly’ report of his sleuth work on Potti et al. (2006, Nature Medicine), as well as the other talks in this final session. On the grumbling side, I must (?) mention that I did not find the Bayes versus frequentism debate really appropriate for the conference, the theme being so remote from MCMC (even though I always enjoy controversial discussions!)