Archive for Bristol
a year ago, a world away
Posted in Statistics with tags Bristol, COVID-19, demonstration, England, flight, Greta Thunberg, pandemics, plane trip, seminar, Travel, United Kingdom, University of Bristol, Wales on February 24, 2021 by xi'an
Bansky in the loo
Posted in Kids, pictures with tags Bansky, Bristol, Britain, coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, England, lockdown, quarantine, rats, toilet on April 26, 2020 by xi'an
The Fry Building [Bristol maths]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags brise soleil screen, Bristol, Charles Francis Hansom, Fry Building, graded building, mathematics department, Peter Green, School of Mathematics, sculpture, University of Bristol, Voronoi tesselation, Wolfson Foundation on March 7, 2020 by xi'an
While I had heard of Bristol maths moving to the Fry Building for most of the years I visited the department, starting circa 1999, this last trip to Bristol was the opportunity for a first glimpse of the renovated building which has been done beautifully, making it the most amazing maths department I have ever visited. It is incredibly spacious and luminous (even in one of these rare rainy days when I visited), while certainly contributing to the cohesion and interactions of the whole department. And the choice of the Voronoi structure should not have come as a complete surprise (to me), given Peter Green’s famous contribution to their construction!
in Bristol for the day
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, ABC-Gibbs, Bristol, Britain, Cardiff, England, intractable likelihood, likelihood-free methods, seminar, slideshare, University of Bristol, Wales on February 28, 2020 by xi'an
I am in Bristol for the day, giving a seminar at the Department of Statistics where I had not been for quite a while (and not since the Department has moved to a beautifully renovated building). The talk is on ABC-Gibbs, whose revision is on the verge of being resubmitted. (I also hope Greta will let me board my plane tonight…)
we have never been unable to develop a reliable predictive model
Posted in Statistics with tags benefit claims, Bristol, child abuse, council, crime prediction, David Spiegelhalter, flooding, local authority, machine learning, Palantir, predictive analytics, RSS, sexual exploitation, software, The Guardian, United Kingdom on November 10, 2019 by xi'an
An alarming entry in The Guardian about the huge proportion of councils in the UK using machine-learning software to allocate benefits, detect child abuse or claim fraud. And relying blindly on the outcome of such software, despite their well-documented lack of reliability, uncertainty assessments, and warnings. Blindly in the sense that the impact of their (implemented) decision was not even reviewed, even though a portion of the councils does not consider renewing the contracts. With the appalling statement of the CEO of one software company reported in the title. Blaming further the lack of accessibility [for their company] of the data used by the councils for the impossibility [for the company] of providing risk factors and identifying bias, in an unbelievable newspeak inversion… As pointed out by David Spiegelhalter in the article, the openness should go the other way, namely that the algorithms behind the suggestions (read decisions) should be available to understand why these decisions were made. (A whole series of Guardian articles relate to this as well, under the heading “Automating poverty”.)
