Loup du Pic

yet another conference scam

Within a few days of the online appearance of the programme of the Workshop on Functional Inference and Machine Intelligence (FIMI) at the University of Bristol, which I am attending, I received the following email about accommodation, which did not sound right despite the focus on the right conference at the right time. After contacting the organisers, it proved to be a scam. A similar thing happened a few months ago with our workshop at CIRM, when one participant was asked to pay for an hotel room that happened to be 100km away… Again taking advantage of a published list of participants to the workshop. There as well the participant found the email suspicious and contacted us.

From: BOOKINGS GTE <bookings@g-travelexperts.com>
To: christian.robert@ceremade.dauphine.fr
Subject: Accommodation in Bristol, England - March 25-27, 
2024 - University of Bristol

Dear Christian,

For your upcoming conference visit to Bristol in March.

Kindly provide your arrival and departure dates for us 
to finalize your reservation. Once confirmed, we will 
email you an invoice and an itinerary including detailed 
information about your booking. Your booking is fully flexible 
for alterations, modifications, or complete cancellations 
up to 14 days before your scheduled check-in date.

Thanks,

Contact the Global Travel Experts Team via our Call Centres:
Our team is ready to assist.

CIRM, Luminy, 1995

StatMathAppli, Fréjus, France [18-22 September 2023]

The bi-yearly StatMathAppli conference will take place next September in Fréjus, France, with guest lecturers Marco Cuturi (ENSAE & Apple ML Research) who will a lecture on “Optimal Transport: From Theory to Tweaks, Computations and Applications in Machine Learning”, and Gareth O. Roberts (University of Warwick) who will give a lecture on “Topics in Retrospective Simulation”. Registration is open and the number of places is limited. (I got invited to the 2002 edition of this workshop, which took place in CIRM, Luminy.)

Fusion at CIRM

Today is the first day of the FUSION workshop Rémi Bardenet and myself organised. Due to schedule clashes, I will alas not be there, since [no alas!] at the BNP conference in Chili. The program and collection of participants is quite exciting and I hope more fusion will result from this meeting. Enjoy! (And beware of boars, cold water, and cliffs!!!)