a passage to & from India

Our trip from Paris (CDG) to Bengaluru got a wee bit (!) perturbed by 2x bad luck, with a first plane grounded for damages to a wing and a second plane flashing an alarm signal just as it was accelerating to take off, which induced an extra hour of tests, plus an unexpected long wait to get the e-visa at the Bengalore airport, resulting in an arrival in town at 5:30 am! A good thing that my talk was only the next day.

I was glad to be back at the (Tata) Indian Institute of Science and its wonderful campus for the IISA meeting (taking place alternately in India and in the US). The conference program was rich and with a large Bayesian component, but being sleep deprived and slightly sick did not help with my concentration during the talks… Had however nice discussions during the poster session, including one on a most unusual RJMCMC where the model-to-model transform was the identity. In a sense this voided (?) the need for RJMCMC, but it allowed for a fast & valid exploration of the different models.

Quite a contrast in my local lodging conditions, when compared with my previous visit,  since, rather than staying in the ideal visitors’ lodge located at the centre of the campus, I took the (bargain) offer (from IISA) of the nearby Sheraton (!) as the conference hotel with five star conditions, including a proper, outside, empty and non-heated swimming pool.

The (touristy) train trip to Mysore was most pleasant, on an air-conditioned carriage with food vendors proposing their wares all along the journey, great views of the countryside and an arrival sharp on time. The reverse trip to the airport was less successful as the FlyBus we took was crawling rather than flying, with heavy traffic all the way because/despite being New Year Eve’ning.  At some point, a truck carrying what looked like kindling was stuck in a pothole, blocking the highway, and a crane was brought on site to push the truck out of the hole, a strategy that surprisingly worked. But we managed to reach the airport just before midnight, when absolutely nothing happened in relation with the entry into 2023!

off to Bengaluru!

Bangalore workshop [ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಕಾರ್ಯಾಗಾರ] and new book

On the last day of the IFCAM workshop in Bangalore, Marc Lavielle from INRIA presented a talk on mixed effects where he illustrated his original computer language Monolix. And mentioned that his CRC Press book on Mixed Effects Models for the Population Approach was out! (Appropriately listed as out on a 14th of July on amazon!) He actually demonstrated the abilities of Monolix live and on diabets data provided by an earlier speaker from Kolkata, which was a perfect way to start initiating a collaboration! Nice cover (which is all I saw from the book at this stage!) that maybe will induce candidates to write a review for CHANCE. Estimation of those mixed effect models relies on stochastic EM algorithms developed by Marc Lavielle and Éric Moulines in the 90’s, as well as MCMC methods.

Bangalore workshop [ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಕಾರ್ಯಾಗಾರ]

As I am now back home after a rather lengthy and somewhat eventful trip [getting too early to Bangalore airport with 3 hours to spend in the nice and very quiet lounge, followed by another 5 hour wait in the very nice but no so quiet Bombay airport lounge, no visit to the cockpit this time!, and then the usual sick passenger blocking all trains from Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport for one hour, reaching home to find my 97-year old neighbour fallen in her kitchen and calling for help!], I cannot but reflect on the difference between my two trips to India, from the chaos of Varanasi to the orderly peace of the campus of the Indian Institute of Science of Bangalore and even to some extent of the whole city of Bangalore, all proportions guarded. Even managing to get a [new] pair of [new] prescription glasses (or rather spectacles) within three days!

I thus found this trip much less stressful and much profitable, from enjoying the local food to discussing with Indian statisticians. The purpose of the IFCAM workshop was to bring both groups together for potential joint projects funded by IFCAM (at the travel level). While I found most talks were driven by specific applications, esp. in genomics, there are directions where we could indeed collaborate, from capture-recapture to astrostatistics. So it may be that I’ll be back in India in a near future!

Bangalore snapshot [ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಚಿತ್ರ]