yet another conference scam

Within a few days of the online appearance of the programme of the Workshop on Functional Inference and Machine Intelligence (FIMI) at the University of Bristol, which I am attending, I received the following email about accommodation, which did not sound right despite the focus on the right conference at the right time. After contacting the organisers, it proved to be a scam. A similar thing happened a few months ago with our workshop at CIRM, when one participant was asked to pay for an hotel room that happened to be 100km away… Again taking advantage of a published list of participants to the workshop. There as well the participant found the email suspicious and contacted us.

From: BOOKINGS GTE <bookings@g-travelexperts.com>
To: christian.robert@ceremade.dauphine.fr
Subject: Accommodation in Bristol, England - March 25-27, 
2024 - University of Bristol

Dear Christian,

For your upcoming conference visit to Bristol in March.

Kindly provide your arrival and departure dates for us 
to finalize your reservation. Once confirmed, we will 
email you an invoice and an itinerary including detailed 
information about your booking. Your booking is fully flexible 
for alterations, modifications, or complete cancellations 
up to 14 days before your scheduled check-in date.

Thanks,

Contact the Global Travel Experts Team via our Call Centres:
Our team is ready to assist.

keep thunderbird alive!

from an Ukrainian mathematician [День незалежності України]

“Thank you for the message. We are still in (…). Here the life is quiet, only 2-3 air raid alert every day, but since no rocket hit the city yet, people do not care too much about the sounds of sirens. Unfortunately the situation in my city Kharkiv is still very bad and we can not come back. Our institute is still working online, so I still have my salary. But I am very tired of this life of refugees, although I am aware that my problems are \epsilon-size problems, comparing with problems of other Ukrainian people.”

Microsoft cares!

unexpected thanks

I received the following email from an author the other day, after rejecting their paper right after submission:

Dear Prof. Christian Robert,

Thank you very much for your assessment of the paper, your candid feedback and also your encouragement to submit the paper to another journal. We value very much this quick and constructive feedback and the time you need to invest to guarantee such a feedback policy.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our submission and best regards,

Which does not happen that often.