AISTATS 2014 (day #1)

First day at AISTATS 2014! After three Icelandic vacations days driving (a lot) and hinkg (too little) around South- and West-Iceland, I joined close to 300 attendees for this edition of the AISTATS conference series. I was quite happy to be there, if only because I had missed the conference last year (in Phoenix) and did not want this to become a tradition… Second, the mix of statistics, artificial intelligence and machine learning that characterises this conference is quite exciting, if challenging at time. What I most appreciated in this discovery of the conference is the central importance of the poster session, most talks being actually introductions to or oral presentations of posters! I find this feature terrific enough (is there such a notion as “terrific enough”?!) worth adopting in future conferences I am involved in. I just wish I had managed to tour the whole collection of posters today… The (first and) plenary lecture was delivered by Peter Bühlman, who spoke about a compelling if unusual (for me) version of causal inference. This was followed by sessions on Gaussian processes, graphical models, and mixed data sources. One highlight talk was the one by Marc Deisenroth, who showed impressive robotic fast learning based on Gaussian processes. At the end of this full day, I also attended an Amazon mixer where I learned about Amazon‘s entry on the local market, where it seems the company is getting a better picture of the current and future state of the U.S. economy than governmental services, thanks to a very fine analysis of the sales and entries on Amazon‘s entry. Then it was time to bike “home” on my rental bike, in the setting sun…