Đôi nét về GS. Xi’an

Here is a short bio of me written in Vietnamese in conjunction with the course I will give at CMS (Centre for Mathematical Sciences), Ho Chi Min City, next week:

Christian P. Robert là giáo sư tại Khoa Toán ứng dụng của ĐH Paris Dauphine từ năm 2000. GS Robert đã từng giảng dạy ở các ĐH Perdue, Cornell (Mỹ) và ĐH Canterbury (New-Zealand). Ông đã làm biên tập cho tạp chí Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B từ năm 2006 đến năm 2009 và là phó biên tập cho tạp chí Annals of Statistics. Năm 2008, ông làm Chủ tịch của Hiệp hội Thống kê Quốc tế về Thống kê Bayes (ISBA). Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu của GS Robert bao gồm Thống kê Bayes mà tập trung chính vào Lý thuyết quyết định (Decision theory) và Mô hình lựa chọn (Model selection), Lý thuyết về Xích Markov trong mô phỏng và Thống kê tính toán.

R midterms

Here are my R midterm exams, version A and version B in English (as students are sitting next to one another in the computer rooms), on simulation methods for my undergrad exploratory statistics course. Nothing particularly exciting or innovative! Dedicated ‘Og‘s readers may spot a few Le Monde puzzles in the lot…

Two rather entertaining if mundane occurences related to this R exam: one hour prior to the exam, a student came to my office to beg for being allowed to take the solution manual with her (as those midterm exercises are actually picked from an exercise booklet, some students cooperated towards producing a complete solution manual and this within a week!), kind of missing the main point of having an exam. (I have not seen yet this manual but I’d be quite interested in checking the code they produced on that occasion…) During the exam, another student asked me what was the R command to turn any density into a random generator: he had written a density function called mydens and could not fathom why rmydens(n) was not working. The same student later called me as his computer was “stuck”: he was not aware that a “+” prompt on the command line meant R was waiting for him to complete the command… A less comical event that ended well is that a student failed to save her R code (periodically and) at the end of the exam and we had to dig very deep into the machine to salvage her R commands from \tmp as rkward safeguards, as only the .RData file was available at first. I am glad we found this before turning the machine off, otherwise it would have been lost.

Introducing Monte Carlo in PaRis [more slides]

The class started yesterday with a small but focussed and responsive audience! Given the background of the students, and in particular their clear proficiency in R!, I switched between the original slides of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R and those of my Monte Carlo Statistical Methods: course, updated by Olivier Cappé who is teaching the course in Paris-Dauphine this year.

MCMC & ABC

Here are my (preliminary) slides for the Wharton short course, in an evolutionary (!) version that will keep changing along the week as I incorporate the material from a survey on ABC we are currently writing with Jean-Michel Marin and Robin Ryder.

 

R tee-shirt

I gave my introduction to the R course in a crammed amphitheatre of about 200 students today. Had to wear my collectoR teeshirt from Revolution Analytics, even though it only made the kids pay attention for about 30 seconds… The other few “lines” that worked were using the Proctor & Gamble “car 54″ poster and calling bootstrap “Statistics for dummies”, but I have trouble every year in getting the students interested in the topic (simulation) until…I introduced a (dummy) finance example of computing option prices. Sad!