Lyhyt matka Helsinkiin

This is the (possibly mistaken) Google translation for “A short trip to Helsinki” into Finnish! Indeed, being involved into an evaluation panel for the Finnish Academy of Sciences, I will be away to Helsinki, Finland, for the two next days. Although this activity is time-consuming, I always find this kind of experience rewarding as the evaluation of grant applications brings forward current (and future) directions of research in our field. In the current case, although I cannot unveil too much, the panel is broader than in the NSF Statistics and Probability grant panel I was involved with, say, but this is also interesting since colleagues from other fields will necessarily have different perspectives on which directions are more relevant. Contrary to a “popular” belief, I have never had the feeling that some panel members in those situations were clearly biased towards a subfield or a group of researchers, but on the opposite that discussions were quite open and objective. (Of course this may reflect my naïvety rather than truth!)