MCMSki IV (call for proposals)

The next MCMSki IV conference will for the first time host contributed sessions as well as invited sessions. The scientific committee thus welcomes proposals for contributed talks and even more for contributed sessions. Contributed talks are scheduled to last 20 minutes, plus questions, and contributed sessions one hour and a half, including questions, which corresponds to 4 talks or 3 talks and a discussant.

Proposals should be sent to me, Christian Robert, before March 20, 2013, and includes the name of the speaker(s), the title of the talk(s), and a short 5-15 lines abstract(s). All speakers in a contributed session must be contacted and give their agreement prior to the submission of a session, obviously. The scientific committee will then evaluate the proposals and notify the session organiser/the speaker before April 20, 2013. We remind everyone that MCMSki IV will also schedule two evening poster sessions in the best tradition of the Valencia and MCMSki meetings, sessions in which everyone is welcome to present.

Topics for the proposals include “Big Data issues”, “computationally intensive Bayesian applications”, “probabilistic advances for MC methods”, “variance reduction techniques and Rao-Blackwellisation”, “MC for non-parametric Bayes inference “, “adaptive MC”, “interacting MC”, “INLA”, and “ABC”.

ISBA 2012, Kyoto [#0]

The first day of ISBA 2012, Kyoto, consisted of four lectures by Aad van der Vaart, Mike West, Don Berry, and myself. While I had originally understood them to be tutorials in the Valencia tradition, the fact that they were renamed “ISBA lectures on Bayesian foundations” attracted a wide proportion of the conference attendees. I was fairly jet-lagged when giving my talk, but this may have helped to keep the pace at a reasonable level rather than rushing through my 195 slides! There was a party in Gion after the talks in a superb location by the Yasaka Pagoda (unfortunately with Western food!).

This brings me to a call for guest posts: anyone attending ISBA 2012 and wanting to share her or his impressions on the conference, the city, Japanese food or culture, is most welcomed to contact me. Posts will appear here and on the ISBA account of Google+.

Death sequence

August is not looking kindly at statisticians as I have now learned (after ten days of disconnection) of both Arnold Zellner and John Nelder passing away, on Aug. 11 and 15, respectively. Following this close the death of Julian Besag, this is a sad series of departures of leading figures in the fields of statistics and econometrics. Arnold was 83 and, although I had met him in several Valencia meetings—including one in Alicante where we sat together for breakfast with Persi Diaconis and  where an irate [and well-known ] statistician came to Arnold demanding apologies about comments made late the night before!—, I only had true interactions with him during the past years, over the Jeffreys reassessment I conducted with Judith Rousseau and Nicolas Chopin. On this occasion, Arnold was very kindly helpful, pointing out the volume that he had edited on Jeffreys and that I overlooked, discussing more philosophical points about the early part of Theory of Probability, and making a very nice overview of it at the O’Bayes 09 meeting. Always in the kindest manner. Sid Chib wrote an obituary of Arnold Zellner on the ISBA website (Arnold was the first ISBA president). Andrew Gelman also wrote some personal recollections about Arnold. A memorial site has been set up in his honour.

John Nelder was regularly attending the Read Paper sessions at the RSS and these are the only times I met him. He was an impressive figure in many ways, first and foremost for his monumental Generalised Linear Models with Peter McCullagh, a (difficult and uncompromising) book that I strongly recommend to (i.e. force upon!) my PhD students for its depth. I also remember being quite intimidated the first time I talked with him, failing to understand his arguments so completely that I dreaded later discussions… John Nelder was at  Fisher’s Rothamsted Experimental Station for most of his career and was certainly one of the last genuine Fisherians (despite a fairly rude letter of Fisher to him!).

News from ISBA

The June issue of the ISBA Bulletin has just appeared. One piece of information I was looking for is in it, namely that the 2009 DeGroot Prizewinners are Giovanni Parmigiani and Lurdes Inoue for Decision Theory – Principles and Approaches, and Carl Edward Rasmussen and Christopher K.I.Williams for Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning. (I like very much the cover of the second book!) Herbie Lee very kindly highlights my book review (that he calls “a somewhat different article”!) in Bayesian Analysis of Search for Certainty, There is also a farewell note from José Bernardo about the València meetings (to which a “thank you” post-it could have been added!). Plus many other entries…

Valencia 9 [poster]

Yesterday night, I looked around for a LaTeX package to turn our Savage-Dickey paper into a proper poster for Valencia 9. I found a0poster as the first output on google, so I switched to it with a reasonable result (I think!):

The main trouble with a0poster is that the columns and hence the boxes do not naturally fit the text within but that they have to be set by hand. I looked around for a while before finding a way to insert a (Ben Nevis) picture as a background before hitting this solution:

\usepackage{eso-pic}
\newcommand\BackgroundPic{
\put(0,0){
\parbox[b][\paperheight]{\paperwidth}{%
\vfill
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{Nevis5.ps}%
\vfill
}}}

which works quite well. (Except for the requirement to insert postscript graphs.)