CANSSI HSC seminar series

CANSSI on HMMs

The Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute/Institut canadien des sciences statistiques is launching a series of on-line seminars, held once a month.  With journal clubs to prepare the seminar and with student-only meetings with the speakers after each seminar.

Seminars will be broadcast live on the fourth Thursday of the month from 1-2:15 pm Eastern time (18 GMT+2).  Students will meet virtually with the speaker from 2:30-3:30 pm Eastern time. Talks in the fall will focus on Hidden Markov Models, starting on Thursday, September 24, 2020 with Ruth King of the University of Edinburgh.

distributions for parameters [seminar]

Next Thursday, January 25, Nancy Reid will give a seminar in Paris-Dauphine on distributions for parameters that covers different statistical paradigms and bring a new light on the foundations of statistics. (Coffee is at 10am in the Maths department common room and the talk is at 10:15 in room A, second floor.)

Nancy Reid is University Professor of Statistical Sciences and the Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory and Applications at the University of Toronto and internationally acclaimed statistician, as well as a 2014 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2015, she received the Order of Canada, was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and has been awarded many other prestigious statistical and science honours, including the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Award in 1992.

Nancy Reid’s research focuses on finding more accurate and efficient methods to deduce and conclude facts from complex data sets to ultimately help scientists find specific solutions to specific problems.

There is currently some renewed interest in developing distributions for parameters, often without relying on prior probability measures. Several approaches have been proposed and discussed in the literature and in a series of “Bayes, fiducial, and frequentist” workshops and meeting sessions. Confidence distributions, generalized fiducial inference, inferential models, belief functions, are some of the terms associated with these approaches.  I will survey some of this work, with particular emphasis on common elements and calibration properties. I will try to situate the discussion in the context of the current explosion of interest in big data and data science. 

postdoc grants in Canada [deadline]

Just a reminder about the incoming deadline of January 31 for the CANSSI/INCASS postdoctoral grants. Those are restricted to members of CANSSI member institutions, though:

For the 2016-2017 year, up to two CANSSI Postdoctoral Fellowships will be awarded to suitable statistical sciences candidates working in CANSSI member institutions. Candidates should have received their PhD after March 31, 2013, and must have fulfilled all PhD requirements by the time of taking up the award.

a weekend in Banff

Yesterday, I flew from Amsterdam to Calgary to attend the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute Leadership Retreat (15w2214) at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS). The point of this meeting is to brainstorm towards building a research policy and strategy for the newly created CANSSI. To which scientific advisory committee I joined last semester. I just hope my brain will remain functional enough to contribute to the discussion, if not to storm, despite the eight hour time lag! (The drive from Calgary to Banff was beautiful, with flashy yellow bursting from the green landscape: Fall is coming.)