workshop in Columbia

The workshop in Columbia University on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences is quite diverse in its topics.  Reminding me of the conference on Efficient Monte Carlo in Sandbjerg Estate, Sønderborg in 2008, celebrating the 70th birthday of Reuven Rubinstein, incl. some colleagues I had not met since this meeting. Yesterday I thus heard (quite interesting) talks on domains somehow far from my own, from Robert Adler on cohomology (giving a second look  at the thing after the talk I head in Wharton last year), to José Blanchet on simulation for infinite server queues (with a link to perfect sampling I could not exactly trace but that was certainly there). Several of the talks made me think of our Brownian motion confidence band paper, with Wilfrid Kendall and Jean-Michel Marin, esp. Gennady Samorodnitsky’s on the maximum of stochastic processes (and wonder whether we could have gone further in that direction). Pierre Del Moral presented a broad overview of the Feynman-Kacs’ approaches to particle methods, in particular particle MCMC, with application to some financial objects. Paul Glasserman talked about robust MCMC, which I found quite an appealing concept in that it included uncertainties about the model itself. And linked with minimax concepts. And Paul Dupuis exposed a parallel tempering method linked with large deviations, whose paper I am definitely looking forward. Now it is more than time to work on my own talk! (On a very personal basis, I sadly lost my sturdy Canon camera in the taxi from the airport! Will need a new one for the ‘Og!)