MCM in Paris, 2023

The next MCM conference takes place in (downtown) Paris next 26-30 June. Deadlines are 31 December for mini-symposia/invited sessions and 28 February for contributed talks/posters. I appreciate very much the effort in lowering the registration fees to 80€ for students and 170€ for others, whilst including lunches into the deal! (The view of Paris in the above logo is actually taking from Paris Jussieu campus.)

why should I pay $350 for an on-line conference?!

Last year, I was invited to the SIAM-CSE20 conference for a session on ABC, in München, and was about ready to leave when the conference was posponed for pandemic reasons. My hotel in Garching charged me the entire stay, Danke sehr!,  and I am uncertain about having been fully reimbursed for the reservation. The conference is taking place this year as an on-line meeting and I got re-invited. However, when trying to register, I found that the fees were the same as last year. And did not see the point, given the possibility of delivering a high quality virtual conference for free!, except to support SIAM. Hence withdrew my participation to the meeting, which was not particularly high on my list anyway… (On the same day I received another invitation for an Insurance conference, but they got me confused with my namesake!)

post-COVID post-conference mood

Nature ran a 4-page comment on the post-COVID future of massive conferences (NeurIPS or JSM style) and on how to make them less carbon greedy. Some of their common-sense suggestions come close to what I had suggested a while ago and some became promptly implemented in these times of COVID-19 travel restrictions, as, e.g., to systematically include virtual attendance option(s), with provisions from one’s institutions for quality time (as if one was indeed away), to add multiple (3?) regional hubs to a single location, which also offers the perk of a round-the-clock meeting, with an optimisation of the three places chosen to minimise (estimated) total flight distances for the potential participants, as in e.g. choosing U.S. central Chicago rather than extremes like Seattle or Miami, and possibly adding Tokyo and Paris, to reduce the frequency of the monster meetings by coordinating with sister societies, to enforce an individual or institutional maximum yearly budget, to have corporate sponsors turning from travel support to improving remote access in less favoured countries.

Obviously, it seems difficult to completely switch to a fully virtual solution, as attending a conference has many academic dimensions to be accounted for, but the “big ones” should be the first to shrink, if only because the most impacting. And also because small, high quality workshops have much more impact research-wise on their attendants. With the above still offering some savings. And also the possibility to bypass financial, personal, visa, political, life-threatening impossibilities to attend a meeting in a specific foreign country. Provided uncensored remote communication tools are allowed or possible from the said  country. (Calling for the question, barring financial difficulties, and once COVID-related restrictions have been lifted, what are the countries where everyone could consider attending?!)

This year, before lockdown forced the cancellation of ABC in Grenoble, we had set a mirror version in Warwick. Which led us to create the One World ABC seminar. The Bernoulli-IMS World congress was postponed by one year but a few dedicated volunteers managed to build within a few weeks a free impressive virtual substitute with more than 600 talks and close to 2000 participants (so far). Remember it is to take place on 24-28 August, on different time zones and with ten live plenaries repeated twice to this effect.

Next year, we still hope to organise an Objective Bayesian workshop at Casa Matemática Oaxaca (CMO) in México and the current sanitary conditions imply a reduction of the physically present participants by two thirds. Meaning for certain a remote component and possibly a mirror location depending on the state of the World in December 2021.

don’t be late for BayesComp’2020

An important reminder that October 14 is the deadline for regular registration to BayesComp 2020 as late fees will apply afterwards!!! The conference looks attractive enough to agree to pay more, but still…

O’Bayes 2019: poster deadline extension

For potential participants to the ISBA O’Bayes 2019 conference in Warwick next June 28 – July 02, that is, almost everyone except the participants who have already submitted!, this post is to announce that the deadline for poster submission has just been extended till March 15, to account for BNP 12 potential participants having not yet been notified of the accepted contributed sessions. Or the poster presentations there, since the same poster can be discussed at both places, by all means!  (Thank you Robin for pointing this out!) As an aside, the construction of the webpage is still under development for registration fees (low) and university accommodations (cheap), but should be out next week! (The current links are to BAYSM 2018, which took place last year, obviously.)