far south

day of the theses

Today, I will spend my day in thesis defenses, as I take part in a defense committee this morning at Supéléc, about a thesis written by Alireza Roodaki on a new approach to trans-dimensional MCMC for mixtures of distributions. Rather than a new way to simulate from posterior distributions with a varying number of components, the thesis concentrates on the post-simulation processing of the outcome of the simulation, constructing an object similar to the point process representation of Matthew Stephens where components have a meaning across varying dimensions. An interesting and novel perspective. The afternoon, I am part of another defense committee for the habilitation of Fadoua Balabdaoui, my colleague in Paris-Dauphine. Fadoua is working in non-parametric statistics, under shape constraints, but has a wide range of interests and publications that fully justify an habilitation degree at this stage of her career. (Habilitation is a degree required in France and Germany to become a Full Professor and to autonomously advise PhD students.)

Seminar/defence on MCMC

Tomorrow, Gersende Fort will defend her Habilitation à diriger des recherches in Paris-Dauphine. (This degree is like a super-PhD, required to become a professor and to supervise PhD students.) The title of Gersende’s talk and habilitation is Monte Carlo methods and Markov chains for simulation and it is open to the public, so, if you are in Paris, you can take this as a good opportunity for a seminar on Gersende’s work with Monte Carlo and MCMC themes in the past years. The talk takes place in Room D520, at Paris-Dauphine at 10am.