ISBA 2021 low key

Fourth day of ISBA (and ISB@CIRM), which was a bit low key for me as I had a longer hike with my wife in the morning, including a swim in a sea as cold as the Annecy lake last month!, but nonetheless enjoyable and crystal clear, then attacked my pile of Biometrika submissions that had accumulated beyond the reasonable since last week, chased late participants who hadn’t paid yet, reviewed a paper that was due two weeks ago, chatted with participants before they left, discussed a research problem, and as a result ended attending only four sessions over the whole day. Including one about Models and Methods for Networks and Graphs, with interesting computation challenges, esp. in block models, the session in memoriam of Hélène Massam, where Gérard Letac (part of ISB@CIRM!), Jacek Wesolowski, and Reza Mohammadi, all coauthors of Hélène, made presentations on their joint advances. Hélène was born in Marseille, actually, in 1949, and even though she did not stay in France after her École Normale studies, it was a further commemoration to attend this session in her birth-place. I also found out about them working on the approximation of a ratio of normalising constants for the G-Wishart. The last session of my data was the Susie Bayarri memorial lecture, with Tamara Roderick as the lecturer. Reporting on an impressive bunch of tricks to reduce computing costs for hierarchical models with Gaussian processes.