COMPSTAT²⁰²²

I am taking part in [twice delayed] COMPSTAT 2022 this week, held in Bologna, virtually as my travel agenda is already quite heavy for the coming Fall Term. I sort of lost count but methinks this must be the fourth edition of COMPSTAT I am attending, the first one being Bristol in 1998, then Utrecht in 2000, and Paris in 2010. As it happens, all three plenary speakers are my friends and professional colleagues, namely  Holger Detter, Igor Pruenster, and Jean-Michel Zakoian. I am talking in  an Applied Computational Bayes session organised by Daniele Durante and Giacomo Zanella, although the talk is only remotely connected with my abstract from years ago:

Evidence approximation is a central object of Bayesian inference and despite numerous advances in the past decades, there still remain challenges to be met, especially when the sample size is large. We review here some robust solutions like the reverse logistic regression and a modified harmonic mean estimator, before proposing a related algorithm for Bayesian model choice.

Statistics at Bristol [& U]

For the celebration of the recently renovated Fry Building, which I visited in Feb 2019 (my last time in Britain!), the University of Bristol is holding the Fry Conference series, with one dedicated to statistics on 16-17 September 2021. With Peter Green, Arnaud Doucet, and Judith Rousseau among the speakers. It is sadly on-line so does not give one the opportunity to admire the renovated bulding. And the Voronoi sculpture! (And You figures in the title of the conference.)

a year ago, a world away

Bansky in the loo

The Fry Building [Bristol maths]

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!