ISBA 2021, one more week but already in the future!

The main section of the ISBA 2021 (formerly ISBA 2020) conference starts a week from today, with short courses this week, but it is now a futuristic conference in that… the number of registered participants already exceeds the year of the meeting! There are currently 2033 registrations, a quantic leap from the earlier editions (if helped with the virtual nature of the meeting and the absence of any registration fee). Here are the recommendations to be found on the Whova conference portal, just in case:

The ISBA conference will be a mixture of live talks, pre-recorded talks, and posters. All live-streaming will be via Zoom, with links integrated into the Whova platform.

1. 1. Plenary talks (i.e., Foundational Lectures, Keynote Lectures, and Named Lectures) and all invited talks will be live-streamed during the corresponding sessions.
   2. Contributed talks are prerecorded (available from June 10, 2021). During the live-streamed Contributed Sessions, each speaker will give a 5-min live recap of their contributed talk,  highlighting the main points, followed by live discussion and Q&A from the audience.
   3. Contributed speakers who had optionally chosen to accompany their talk with a poster will present the poster in their designated Poster Sessions. All Poster Sessions will be held on Gather.town, which will also serve as the virtual space for social times during the whole conference.
   4. Gather.town is live at https://gather.town/app/QZTh2a4InnLxAvYF/ISBA_WM_2021_main. You should be able to access with the same email used to register for Whova.

And be aware that the schedule page does not contain the links to the prerecorded videos and slides. Make sure to use the webapp link.

Juan Antonio Cano Sanchez (1956-2018)

I have just learned the very sad news that Juan Antonio Cano, from Universidad de Murcia, with whom Diego Salmerón and I wrote two papers on integral priors, has passed away, after a long fight against a kidney disease. Having communicated with him recently, I am quite shocked by him passing away as I was not aware of his poor health. The last time we met was at the O’Bayes 2015 meeting in Valencià, with a long chat in the botanical gardens of the Universitat de Valencià. Juan Antonio was a very kind and unassuming person, open and friendly, with a continued flow of research in Objective Bayes methodology and in particular on integral priors. Hasta luego, Juan Antonio!

Jayanta Kumar Ghosh [1937-2017]

Just head from Sonia and Judith that our friend and fellow Bayesian Jayanta K Ghosh (জয়ন্ত কুমার ঘোষ in Bengali) has passed away a few days ago in Lafayette. He was a wonderful man, very kind to everyone and open for discussing all aspects of Bayesian theory and methodology. While he worked on many branches of statistics, he is more know to Bayesians for his contributions to Bayesian asymptotics. From Bernstein-von-Mises convergence theorems to frequentist validation of non-informative priors, to the Bayesian analysis of infinite dimensional problems, including consistency of posteriors and rates of convergence, and to Bayesian and Empirical Bayes model selection rules in high dimensional problems. He also wrote an introductory textbook on Bayesian Statistics ten years ago with Mohan Delampady and Tapas Samanta. And a monograph of higher order asymptotics. I knew from this summer that J K was quite sick and am quite sad to learn of his demise. He will be missed by all for his gentleness and by Bayesians for his contributions to the fields of objective and non-parametric Bayesian statistics…