Choose France – CNRS AI Rising Talents Programme for exceptionally talented early-career AI researchers

The French national scientific research institute, CNRS, is launching a one-shot call for hiring early-career  AI researchers on a 5 year 100% research position in any of the CNRS research units in France. Including ours in Paris Dauphine. The offer is quite generous in that the attached grant provides a full professor salary and support to hire postdocs and PhD students. Early career means two to seven years after PhD. The deadline is 30 November.

MCMSki IV, Jan. 6-8, 2014, Chamonix (news #11)

Now that the important deadline of October 15 for MCMSki IV is over,

First, thanks to the more that 160 participants who already registred! The audience is now larger than at any of the previous MCMSki meetings! (Obviously, from a statistical perspective, the comparison is somewhat unfair as running three parallel sessions instead of one single track session is bound to attract more participants, like the speakers themselves!) But it means a lot of people interacting with one another, sharing ideas and tricks at the coffee breaks. Fighting for restaurants and ski lifts. Exchanging stories and gossips at the poster session(s). Competing during the Richard Tweedie ski race. Sounds very exciting! And those who have not yet registered still have till mid December to do so (the only potential worry being a shortage of rooms available in town).

Second, 28 students and junior investigators have been awarded the young investigator travel support for some moderate amount of money toward travelling to Geneva and Chamonix. Thanks to ISBA and to SBSS (the Bayesian Statistical Science Section of the ASA) and to the BayesComp Section of ISBA for their financial support.

Third, let me repeat that poster presentations are not subject to a selection process and that anyone attending MCMSki IV should feel like presenting a poster at one of the two poster nights. There is still plenty of space and of opportunities for interactions and sound advices. Just send an abstract to bayesianstatistics@gmail.com ! See my special wordpress blog for the first deposits of abstracts.

MCMSki IV, Jan. 6-8, 2014, Chamonix (news #10)

This a final reminder about the October 15 deadlines for MCMSki IV:

First, the early bird rate for the registration ends up on October 15.

Second, the young investigator travel support can only be requested up to October 15 as well. (For those waiting for the decision about the support to register, the registration deadline will be lifted!)

Third, poster presentations are not subject to a selection process: anyone attending MCMSki IV is free to present a poster at one of the two poster nights. Just send an abstract to bayesianstatistics@gmail.com !

MCMSki IV, Jan. 6-8, 2014, Chamonix (news #9)

This a reminder about the October 15 deadlines for MCMSki IV:

First, the early bird rate for the registration ends up on October 15.

Second, the young investigator travel support can only be requested up to October 15 as well.

Be sure to book your hotel or rental place early too as Chamonix is quite popular in January. (I had few choices left for my own rental, a few weeks ago..!)

in praise of the referee (or not)

While I was editing our “famous” In praise of the referee paper—well, famous for being my most rejected paper ever!, with one editor not even acknowledging receipt!!—for the next edition of the ISBA Bulletin—where it truly belongs, being in fine a reply to Larry’s tribune therein a while ago—, Dimitris Politis had written a column for the IMS Bulletin—March 2013 Issue, page 11—on Refereeing and psychoanalysis.

Uh?! What?! Psychoanalysis?! Dimitris’ post is about referees being rude or abusive in their report, expressing befuddlement at seeing such behaviour in a scientific review. If one sets aside cases of personal and ideological antagonisms—always likely to occur in academic circles!—, a “good” reason for referees to get aggressively annoyed to the point of rudeness is sloppiness of one kind or another in the paper under review. One has to remember that refereeing is done for free and with no clear recognition in the overwhelming majority of cases, out of a sense of duty to the community and of fairness for having our own papers refereed. Reading a paper where typos abound, where style is so abstruse as to hide the purpose of the work, where the literature is so poorly referenced as to make one doubts the author(s) ever read another paper, the referee may feel vindicated by venting his/her frustration at wasting one’s time by writing a few vitriolic remarks.  Dimitris points out this can be very detrimental to young researchers. True, but what happened to the advisor at this stage?! Wasn’t she/he supposed to advise her/his PhD student not only in conducting innovative research but also in producing intelligible outcome and in preparing papers suited for the journal it is to be submitted to..?! Being rude and aggressive does not contribute to improve the setting, no more than headbutting an Italian football player helps in winning the World Cup, but it may nonetheless be understood without resorting to psychoanalysis!

Most interestingly, this negative aspect of refereeing—that can be curbed by posterior actions of AEs and editors—would vanish if some of our proposals were implemented, incl. making referee’ reports part of the referee’s publication list, making those reports public as comments on the published paper (if published), and creating repositories or report commons independent from journals…