fake application

A while ago, I was part of a hiring committee for a university abroad and among the applications we found one that was so blatantly fake as to wonder what was the purpose of the person (persons?) behind it. From a massive vita including all rewards in the field, incl. a COPSS presidential award, to publications in all top journals and conferences, with the applicant name added to the list of real authors, to fake affiliations, to a completely fake Google Scholar page, &tc. I was surprised at the possibility to include papers on one’s Scholar profile without appearing among the authors but this is apparently possible. And I wonder at the attempt itself since the application is screaming “fake”! A very weird form of performance art?! After searching a wee bit more, I found that some of my French colleagues had opened a webpage to warn about the activities of this individual (?). Including plagiarised papers or books still for sale on Amazon.

congrats [IMS related]

When I read through the June-July issue of the IMS Bulletin, I saw many causes for celebration and congratulations!, from Richard Samworth’s award of an Advanced ERC grant, to the new IMS fellows, including my friends, Ismael Castillo, Steve Mc Eachern, and Natesh Pillai, as well as my current or former associate editors, Johan Segers (JRSS B) and Changbao Wu (Biometrika). To my friends Alicia Carriquiry, David Dunson, and Tamara Broderick receiving 2021 COPSS awards, along others, including Wing Hung Wong (of the precursor Tanner & Wong, 1987 fame!). Natesh also figures among the “Quadfecta 23”, the exclusive club of authors having published at least one paper in each of the four Annals published by the IMS!

R wins COPSS Award!

Hadley Wickham from RStudio has won the 2019 COPSS Award, which expresses a rather radical switch from the traditional recipient of this award in that this recognises his many contributions to the R language and in particular to RStudio. The full quote for the nomination is his  “influential work in statistical computing, visualisation, graphics, and data analysis” including “making statistical thinking and computing accessible to a large audience”. With the last part possibly a recognition of the appeal of Open Source… (I was not in Denver for the awards ceremony, having left after the ABC session on Monday morning. Unfortunately, this session only attracted a few souls, due to the competition of twentysome other sessions, including, excusez du peu!, David Dunson’s Medallion Lecture and Michael Lavine’s IOL on the likelihood principle. And Marco Ferreira’s short-course on Bayesian time series. This is the way the joint meeting goes, but it is disappointing to reach so few people.)

JSM 2018 [#4]

As last ½ day of sessions at JSM2018 in an almost deserted conference centre, with a first session set together by Mario Peruggia and a second on Advances in Bayesian Nonparametric Modeling and Computation for Complex Data. Here are the slides of my talk this morning in the Bayesian mixture estimation session.

which I updated last night (Slideshare most absurdly does not let you update versions!)

Since I missed the COPSS Award ceremony for a barbecue with friends on Locarno Beach, I only discovered this morning that the winner this year is Richard Samworth, from Cambridge University, who eminently deserves this recognition, if only because of his contributions to journal editing, as I can attest from my years with JRSS B. Congrats to him as well as to Bin Yu and Susan Murphy for their E.L. Scott and R.A. Fisher Awards!  I also found out from an email to JSM participants that the next edition is in Denver, Colorado, which I visited only once in 1993 on a trip to Fort Collins visiting Kerrie Mengersen and Richard Tweedie. Given the proximity to the Rockies, I am thinking of submitting an invited session on ABC issues, which were not particularly well covered by this edition of JSM. (Feel free to contact me if you are interested in joining the session.)

JSM 2018 [#3]

Third day at JSM2018 and the audience is already much smaller than the previous days! Although it is hard to tell with a humongous conference centre spread between two buildings. And not getting hooked by the tantalising view of the bay, with waterplanes taking off every few minutes…

Still, there were (too) few participants in the two computational statistics (MCMC) sessions I attended in the morning, the first one being organised by James Flegal on different assessments of MCMC convergence. (Although this small audience made the session quite homely!) In his own talk, James developed an interesting version of multivariate ESS that he related with a stopping rule for minimal precision. Vivek Roy also spoke about a multiple importance sampling construction I missed when it came upon on arXiv last May.

In the second session, Mylène Bédard exposed the construction of and improvement brought by local scaling in MALA, with 20% gain from using non-local tuning. Making me idle muse over whether block sizes in block-Gibbs sampling could also be locally optimised… Then Aaron Smith discussed how HMC should be scaled for optimal performances, under rather idealised conditions and very high dimensions. Mentioning a running time of d, the dimension, to the power ¼. But not addressing the practical question of calibrating scale versus number of steps in the discretised version. (At which time my hands were [sort of] frozen solid thanks to the absurd air conditioning in the conference centre and I had to get out!)