the year(s) with no conferences

This week, Nature has an article on “A year without conferences? How the coronavirus pandemic could change research”, where the journalist predicts a potential halt to scientific conferences. Taking as example the cancelled American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting, to quote

“many of them rapidly set up platforms to hold virtual sessions for the meeting, inviting their speakers to present by webcam or to upload their presentations to online repositories. Researchers who hadn’t been in a position to fly to Denver found themselves able to participate from afar in what became the Virtual APS March Meeting.”

On this same day I should have been traveling from Brussels to Grenoble for the ABC meeting there. Instead, I had a four day virtual panel meeting from home and there is no virtual version of the ABC in Gre[e]noble workshop. As no one seemed particularly eager to animate a few local talks with no guarantee of spectators. As things deteriorated to home confinement,  it was actually better not to spend more efforts on the project. Since this confinement is bound to last much longer, it would however become more obvious that the community and the academic societies need plan virtual conference and invent different channels to gather members and disseminate innovation.

a la casa matemática de Oaxaca [reminiscence]

As this was my very first trip to the CMO part of CMO-BIRS, as opposed to many visits to BIRS, Banff, here are my impressions about this other mathematical haven, aka resort, aka retreat… First definitely a very loooong trip from Paris (especially when sitting next to three drunk women speaking loudly the whole trip, thankfully incomprehensibly in Russian!), with few connections between Mexico City [airport] and Oaxaca,  adding [for me] a five and a half hour stay over in the airport, where I experimented for the first time a coffin-like “sleep pod” hostel and some welcome rest. But presumably an easier access compared with Calgary for mathematicians from the South and East of the USA. And obviously for those Central and from South Americas.Then, contrary to Banff, the place for the Casa Matemàtica Oaxaca is for the time being essentially a permanently booked hotel, rather than a dedicated conference centre. Facilities are thus less attuned to visiting mathematicians, like missing real desks in bedrooms or working rooms. Still a nice with a very peaceful inner yard (and too small a pool to consider swimming). Actually facilitating interactions when compared with Banff: blackboards in the patios, tables outside, general quiet atmosphere (except for the endlessly barking dogs in the neighbourhood). Of course the huge difference in the weathers between both places does matter. Paradoxically (given the size of Oaxaca City), CMO is more isolated than BIRS, where downtown is a mere five minute walks, even in the middle of winter. Except for the occasional blizzard. But Oaxaca offers a fabulous food scene worth the longer trip!As for outdoors, there is also a swimming pool (Cina). And back streets to run on, even though the presence of stray dogs in about every road making running broken and haphazard (never run by a dog!, which is my rule since a tiny but angry dog bit my ankle in Caracas!). Running splits up hill a few times every morning was great training! There is furthermore the possibility of sport climbing in nearby San Sebastian de Tutla, as I experienced with Aventours, a local guiding company. And bouldering in an even closer gym.

Rundlestone Session

Ellesmere Island [jatp]

rare events for ABC

Dennis Prangle, Richard G. Everitt and Theodore Kypraios just arXived a new paper on ABC, aiming at handling high dimensional data with latent variables, thanks to a cascading (or nested) approximation of the probability of a near coincidence between the observed data and the ABC simulated data. The approach amalgamates a rare event simulation method based on SMC, pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings and of course ABC. The rare event is the near coincidence of the observed summary and of a simulated summary. This is so rare that regular ABC is forced to accept not so near coincidences. Especially as the dimension increases.  I mentioned nested above purposedly because I find that the rare event simulation method of Cérou et al. (2012) has a nested sampling flavour, in that each move of the particle system (in the sample space) is done according to a constrained MCMC move. Constraint derived from the distance between observed and simulated samples. Finding an efficient move of that kind may prove difficult or impossible. The authors opt for a slice sampler, proposed by Murray and Graham (2016), however they assume that the distribution of the latent variables is uniform over a unit hypercube, an assumption I do not fully understand. For the pseudo-marginal aspect, note that while the approach produces a better and faster evaluation of the likelihood, it remains an ABC likelihood and not the original likelihood. Because the estimate of the ABC likelihood is monotonic in the number of terms, a proposal can be terminated earlier without inducing a bias in the method.

This is certainly an innovative approach of clear interest and I hope we will discuss it at length at our BIRS ABC 15w5025 workshop next February. At this stage of light reading, I am slightly overwhelmed by the combination of so many computational techniques altogether towards a single algorithm. The authors argue there is very little calibration involved, but so many steps have to depend on as many configuration choices.