back from CIRM

As should be clear from earlier posts, I tremendously enjoyed this past week at CIRM, Marseille, and not only for providing a handy retreat from where I could go running and climbing at least twice a day!  The programme (with slides and films soon to be available on the CIRM website) was very well-designed with mini-courses and talks of appropriate length and frequency. Thanks to Nicolas Chopin (ENSAE ParisTech) and Gilles Celeux  (Inria Paris) for constructing so efficiently this program and to the local organisers Thibaut Le Gouic (Ecole Centrale de Marseille), Denys Pommeret (Aix-Marseille Université), and Thomas Willer (Aix-Marseille Université) for handling the practical side of inviting and accommodating close to a hundred participants on this rather secluded campus. I hope we can reproduce the experiment a few years from now. Maybe in 2018 if we manage to squeeze it between BayesComp 2018 [ex-MCMski] and ISBA 2018 in Edinburgh.

One of the bonuses of staying at CIRM is indeed that it is fairly isolated and far from the fury of down-town Marseille, which may sound like a drag, but actually helps with concentration and interactions. Actually, the whole Aix-Marseille University campus of Luminy on which CIRM is located is surprisingly quiet: we were there in the very middle of the teaching semester and saw very few students around (although even fewer boars!). It is a bit of a mystery that a campus built in such a beautiful location with the Mont Puget as its background and the song of cicadas as the only source of “noise” is not better exploited towards attracting more researchers and students. However remoteness and lack of efficient public transportation may explain a lot about this low occupation of the campus. As may the poor quality of most buildings on the campus, which must be unbearable during the summer months…

In a potential planning for the future Bayesian week at CIRM, I think we could have some sort of poster sessions after-dinner (with maybe a cash bar operated by some of the invited students since there is no bar at CIRM or around). Or trail-running under moonlight, trying to avoid tripping over rummaging boars… A sort of Kaggle challenge would be nice but presumably too hard to organise. As a simpler joint activity, we could collectively contribute to some wikipedia pages related to Bayesian and computational statistics.