Today, the Université Paris-Dauphine signed three double degree agreements with Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM). Including one in mathematics for our undergraduates. This means some of our students could spend the second year in Madrid and some students of UAM could spend their third year in Paris-Dauphine, while getting both degrees at the end of the fourth year. Con la esperanza de atraer a muchos estudiantes en ambos sentidos!
Today I gave my first lecture in Universidad Autonoma Madrid. Apart from a shaky start due to my new computer not recognising the videoprojector, I covered EM for mixtures in the one and half hour of the course. I obviously finished the day with tapas in a nearby bar, vaguely watching Barcelona playing an improbable team to merge with the other patrons… In the second lecture, I hope to illustrate both EM and Gibbs on a simple mixture likelihood surface.
As I already did two years ago, in connection with the double degree between UAM and Dauphine, I will give a short graduate course at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM). It will be part of the regular fourth year statistics course and will focus on mixtures, as given in of Bayesian Core. It will take place on the afternoons of April 12 and 14. The slides are available on the webpage of Bayesian Core. I also plan to run R codes during the class.
In connection with the course I gave in Madrid last November, Adolfo Quiros from UAM came to present the double degree to our students today. Most sadly, maybe because this is an exam period, only two interested students showed up… This is disappointing, to say the least!, because the double degree should be quite appealing to our students, both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. First, the contents of the math courses at UAM are similar enough to ours for our students to face the year abroad; second, this is a perfect opportunity to study in a top university in Madrid—a thriving student city if any!— and to obtain a second degree at no other “cost” than (reasonably) hard work. This is actually the only double degree we offer at the undergrad level and I do not understand why our students do not grasp the appeal of this formula, especially when considering that most of them have five or six years of Spanish training… Obviously, they are more attracted by UK and US universities, but we have hardly any exchange agreement left nowadays.
The course at UAM was attended by about twenty persons, both students and faculty, which is a fairly good audience in a Master program where most students of UAM opt for an Analysis curriculum, rather than Statistics or Probability. Actually, some students came from La Universidad Complutense de Madrid. (The name always evokes in me some connection with computing, but actually comes from the Latin complutum!) I did not go as far as I wished since I only covered the two first first two chapters of Bayesian Core. (A side consequence of the editing of “Introducing…” is that I now avoid inverting the digit and “first” in a sentence!) But I managed to go through the important points of selling the Bayesian approach to testing as concentrating on model choice and its consequences, and also of presenting the fully automated regression [Bayesian] analysis using n as the g (!) in the g-prior modelling. Those two points will come reinforced in the revision of Bayesian Core, especially since Jim Albert introduced g-priors in his second edition! As an aside, the UAM campus was quite enjoyable due to an Indian summer spell that turned the morning light in the autumnal leaves into a very warm colour.
Xi'an's Og 