going blonde

In case you are currently visiting Edinburgh, e.g. for ISBA 2018, and wondering where to have lunch or dinner, there is a wee restaurant a bit out of the [tourist] way called Blonde, where I ate several times during ICMS workshops. It is located on St. Leonards Street, next to Rebus‘ former offices!, and serves original and tasty cuisine, with a friendly and unassuming service and vegetarian options. It is but a few blocks away [south] from the conference location, towards Arthur’s Seat as an iconic background. And at a fairly reasonable price. Including the wine list.

Bayes-250, Edinburgh

       

On September 5-7, I am attending Bayes-250 at the University of Edinburgh. I arrived under a blazing sun that showed Arthur’s Seat in full glory! (I realised I had never seen it in the sun before!)

My talk is a short version of the ABC in London talk about ABC model choice, in connection with the recently published PNAS paper.

On Monday afternoon, David Dunson gave a plenary talk on the use of tensors in Bayesian non-parametric modeling and the possibilities offered by this highly malleable tool that made me look forward reading his 2009 JASA paper with Xing. In the evening, David Spiegelhalter delivered a great (and well-attended) public lecture on the Bayesian nature of risk that made me think further about the de Finetti‘s “probability does not exist”, a declaration that had irked me until then. (And on which I will expand in a later comment on Error and Inference.) We ended up the day in Blonde, a nice restaurant we had already enjoyed during the mixture meeting in 2009.