Archive for Belgium
Brussel mural
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags baobab trees, Belgium, Bruxelles, high rise, murals on September 17, 2022 by xi'anBrussels skyline [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags Belgium, Brussel Noord, Brussels, Bruxelles, business district, high rise, jatp, Laeken, morning run, Sunday morning, sunrise on September 12, 2022 by xi'anAtoms [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags 1958 Brussels World's Fair, Atomium, Belgium, Brussels, Bruxelles, Exposition Universelle, hijacking, jatp, morning run, nuclear power plant, Russian invasion, sculpture, Sunday morning, Zaporizhzhia on September 10, 2022 by xi'anparallel MCMC
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Belgium, pandemic, parallel MCMC, thesis defence on September 9, 2020 by xi'anYesterday, I remotely took part in the thesis defence of Balazs Nemeth, at Hasselt University, Belgium. As the pandemic conditions were alas still too uncertain to allow for travelling between France and Belgium… The thesis is about parallel strategies for speeding up MCMC, although the title is “Message passing computational methods with pharmacometrics applications”, as the thesis was suppported by Johnson & Johnson. (The defence was in English, as I do not understand a word of Dutch…) Among the solutions, distributed affine-invariant sampling à la Goodman & Weare, speculative parallelism for SMC, and an automated parallelisation for hierarchical models that is the core input of the thesis. These methods were not associated with designing new MCMC algorithms but rather intended to take advantage of parallelisation for existing MCMC algorithms, which meant issues like asynchronicity or data splitting were not considered therein. I however found the work in the thesis innovative and promising and the PhD candidate was awarded the title by the jury at the end of the defence!