Mike Titterington (1945-2023)

Most sadly, I just heard from Glasgow that my friend and coauthor Mike Titterington passed away last weekend. While a significant figure in the field and a precursor in many ways, from mixtures to machine learning, Mike was one of the kindest persons ever, tolerant to a fault and generous with his time, and I enjoyed very much my yearly visits to Glasgow to work with him (and elope to the hills). This was also the time he was the (sole) editor of Biometrika and to this day I remain amazed at the amount of effort he dedicated to it, annotating every single accepted paper with his red pen during his morning bus commute and having the edited copy mailed to the author(s). The last time I saw him was in October 2019, when I was visiting the University of Edinburgh and the newly created Bayes Centre, and he came to meet me for an afternoon tea, despite being in poor health… Thank you for all these years, Mike!

and here we go!

On March 1, I have started handling papers for Biometrika as deputy editor, along with Omiros Papaspiliopoulos. With on average one paper a day to handle this means a change in my schedule and presumably less blog posts about recent papers and arXivals if I want to keep my daily morning runs!

conference deadlines

Just to remind participants to AISTATS 2016 and to ISBA 2016 that the deadlines for early registration are January 31 and February 10, getting close. Since both fees are quite high, it certainly makes sense to take advantage of those deadlines (and to make all travel reservations). (While I did try to see the fees of AISTATS 2016 set to a lower value, half of the fees are paying for coffee breaks and the banquet and the welcome party and were not negotiable. As my suggestion of cancelling the banquet was not accepted either! At least, the offer of accommodations in Cadiz is reasonable, from the list of hotels on the website, to a large collection of airbnb listings [minus the one I just reserved!]. And both Spain and Italy set an heavy 20% tax on conferences… Warning: the AISTATS 2016 do not cover the shuttle bus transfer from Sevilla, the major airport in the vicinity.)

AISTATS 2016 [post-decisions]

Now that the (extended) deadline for AISTATS 2016 decisions is gone, I can gladly report that out of 594 submissions, we accepted 165 papers, including 35 oral presentations. As reported in the previous blog post, I remain amazed at the gruesome efficiency of the processing machinery and at the overwhelmingly intense involvement of the various actors who handled those submissions. And at the help brought by the Toronto Paper Matching System, developed by Laurent Charlin and Richard Zemel. I clearly was not as active and responsive as many of those actors and definitely not [and by far] as my co-program-chair, Arthur Gretton, who deserves all the praise for achieving a final decision by the end of the year. We have already received a few complaints from rejected authors, but this is to be expected with a rejection rate of 73%. (More annoying were the emails asking for our decisions in the very final days…) An amazing and humbling experience for me, truly! See you in Cadiz, hopefully.

AISTATS 2016 [post-submissions]

Now that the deadline for AISTATS 2016 submissions is past, I can gladly report that we got the amazing number of 559 submissions, which is much more than what was submitted to the previous AISTATS conferences. To the point it made us fear for a little while [but not any longer!] that the conference room was not large enough. And hope that we had to install video connections in the hotel bar!

Which also means handling about the same amount of papers as a year of JRSS B submissions within a single month!, the way those submissions are handled for the AISTATS 2016 conference proceedings. The process is indeed [as in other machine learning conferences] to allocate papers to associate editors [or meta-reviewers or area chairs] with a bunch of papers and then have those AEs allocate papers to reviewers, all this within a few days, as the reviews have to be returned to authors within a month, for November 16 to be precise. This sounds like a daunting task but it proceeded rather smoothly due to a high degree of automation (this is machine-learning, after all!) in processing those papers, thanks to (a) the immediate response to the large majority of AEs and reviewers involved, who bid on the papers that were of most interest to them, and (b) a computer program called the Toronto Paper Matching System, developed by Laurent Charlin and Richard Zemel. Which tremendously helps with managing about everything! Even when accounting for the more formatted entries in such proceedings (with an 8 page limit) and the call to the conference participants for reviewing other papers, I remain amazed at the resulting difference in the time scales for handling papers in the fields of statistics and machine-learning. (There was a short lived attempt to replicate this type of processing for the Annals of Statistics, if I remember well.)