ISBA²⁴ [call for contributed talks]

Now that the invited sessions have been selected by the scientific committee of ISBA²⁴ (with both sessions in which I am involved, Bayesian data privacy and The future of ISBA conferences, accepted), the call is open for contributed talks, with deadline 17 November. (If  this helps in making a proposal, childcare will be available during the conference.)

Contributed talks will be 20 minutes long. Please note that the one-oral-presentation-per-speaker policy is in effect: Each participant shall give at most one oral presentation. All talks, discussions, and panel discussions, &tc count as an oral presentation, the only exceptions being discussants for Named Lectures, and presenters of short courses.

 

ISBA²⁴ [website]

trở về từ thành phố hồ chí minh

While fast and furious (!), the days I spent in Ho Chi Minh City (at UEH, the university of economics of HCMC) were most enjoyable, from running very early in the relatively cool morning, by the nearby canal, often with others, to the group breakfast at a small food stall, or another, with a huge variety of dishes, to multiple discussions at the coffee and lunch breaks (with an unknown [by me] fruit every day!), to question sessions, despite my massive infodump, especially  on the first lecture!, with the above picture taken during the ABC lecture, with Long Nguyen’s logical map between lectures, to group dinners with again a huge variety of dishes, and above all an incredibly friendly crowd of students and faculty that made days fly! The school was well-prepared with a reading program prior to it and a project dissertation posterior to it. Cảm ơn họ vì lòng tốt của họ!

Approximation Methods in Bayesian Analysis [#3]

My last day (#4) at the workshop, as I had to return to Paris earlier. A rather theoretical morning again, with Morgane Austern on (probabilistic) concentration inequalities on transport distances, far from my comfort zone if lively, Jason Xu on replacing non-convex penalisation factors to distances to the corresponding manifold, which I found most interesting if not directly helpful for simulating over submanifolds, and Hugo Lavenant on studying the impact of prior choice as merging of opinions, in the (Milanese) setting of completely random measures, with the surprise occurrence of a double bent for some choices. The afternoon session saw Andrew Gelman reflecting on multiscale modelling (sans slide et sans tableau) and Chris Holmes introduce the fundamentals of Bayesian conformal prediction, towards reaching well-calibrated (in a frequentist sense) Bayesian procedures by resorting to exchangeability and rank tests. I alas missed the other talks of the day.

In recap, this was a wonderful conference, with a perfect audience size, a diverse if intense program, and a lot of interactions. In addition, the short talk sessions worked very nicely, even at 22:10 after a long day. And attracted very strong audience, even at 22:10! Indeed, they were uniformly well-calibrated, time-wise, and with high clarity messages. To be repeated. As there were many newcomers to CIRM, they discovered the idiosyncrasies of the place and of its surrounding, mostly positively.

On the outdoor front, the week saw an overall moderately hot weather but a constant wind that prevented me from sleeping (well), but which helped with waking up before dawn to cycle or run to my open water pool! The sea remained reasonably choppy, so waves did not prevent my swimming.

Approximation Methods in Bayesian Analysis [#1]

Interesting first day, if somewhat intense!, with Sylvia Richardson talking of divide & conquer strategies, which we had recently explored in our work on mixtures with Adrien and Judith. Then Jere Koskela (Warwick) on sufficient conditions for consistent inference on trees like Kingman’s coalescent. And in the afternoon Julia-Adela Palacios on tree estimation, with novel notions of tree distances and barycentre (soon to appear in Biometrika!). And Julyan Arbel on the notion and properties of priors within (deep) neural networks, following different asymptotics. On top of this, two fast sessions for people presenting their poster, to be attended tonight. And the usual early morning run to swim 25mn in one of the calanques… Luckily enough, Marseille is not too hot this week, feeling even nicer than Paris!