in defense of subjectivity [sound the gong]

When browsing the IMS Bulletin [01 October] a few days ago, I saw that Ruobin Gong (from Rutgers) had written a tribune about Subjectivism. In response to [IMS President] Krysz Burdzy’s presidential address at the IMS Meeting in London a few months earlier. Address that I had missed and where he was calling for the end of the term subjective in statistics… (While ironically attending the Bayesian conference in Montréal!) Given the tone of his Search for Certainty book, which Andrew and Larry and I discussed a while ago, I am not at all surprised by another go at Bayesian statistics, but I will not indulge into another response, since Krysz found my earlier review “venomous”! Especially since Ruobin has produced a deeply argument ed and academically grounded criticism of the presidential address (which, if I may mention it, sounds rather rambling away from statistics). In particular, Ruobin introduces Objectivity³ as “an interpreted characterization of the scientific object”, which reminds me of Nietzsche’s aphorism about physics. And where personal and collegial inputs are plusses, even though they could be qualified to be “subjective”. This was also Poincaré’s argument for Bayesian reasoning. In conclusion, I think that the London call to cease using the term in statistics was neither timely (as the subjective-versus-objective debate has sort of dried out) nor appropriate (in that it clashed with the views of part of the IMS community).

IMS conFlorence [ICSDS2022]

The IMS is launching a new conference series, the annual IMS International Conference on Statistics and Data Science (ICSDS), whose goal is to reach out and expand membership from emerging areas of data science, underrepresented groups, and from regions outside of North America,  first edition is next December (13-16) in Firenze (Florence), Italy. (And which I plan to attend.) Reposted from the conference web page:

The objective of ICSDS is to bring together researchers in statistics and data science from academia, industry and government in a stimulating setting to exchange ideas on the developments of modern statistics, machine learning, and broadly defined theory, methods and applications in data science.

The conference will consist of plenary sessions, and about 50 invited, contributed and poster sessions. Young researchers are particularly encouraged to participate, as a portion of the invited sessions will be designated for young researchers.

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!

[o-l] ISBA 2021 [百花齊放，百家爭鳴]

As usual, when looking for our ISBA World conference, ISBA [now] 2021, many alternative realities emerge, ISBA being such a popular acronym! The actual dates for the (true and only) ISBA 2021 conference are 28 June – 02 July and the location is no longer Kunming, China, since there is a pandemic going on!!! The conference is now on-line, which forces a complete rethinking of its organisation, away from a sheer replica on Zoom of the traditional conference. And with no registration fees!! I have agreed to join other ISBA members to contribute (with limited abilities) to this switch and obviously welcome comments towards it! Having greatly learned from the earlier experience with the One World Bernoulli+IMS conference last summer, thanks to the dedication and imagination of Leif Döring!, here are some line of thought:

• Keep in mind days are 24 hours long and attention span much smaller, towards keeping the offer manageable for a fully engaged participant
• Account and take advantage of the multiple time zones available to virtual participants to stretch the schedule to cover as many participants as possible, with a potential multiplication of (plenary) talks and posters
• Avoid filling the on-line schedule with live talks but have them pre-registered, possibly with several levels of length and depth, including a one-slide two-minute version
• Exploit on-line abilities to focus solely (?) on interactions, which is the main point of conferences, meaning participants joining for a thematic session over a reasonable duration to discuss talks or posters they had attended on their own before, with a catalyst leading the show with prepared questions
• Preregister poster presentations as well, so that live poster sessions involve only questions and discussions, and group poster by theme (an attempt of mine at the earlier ISBA conferences) so that presenters and visitors can interact at the theme level rather than being stuck in an empty room with one’s poster
• Create local mirrors when people could physically (safely!) gather to attend the conference, from watching videos and poster together to engage into a local plus virtual discussion during interaction sessions. I certainly plan to hold one such session in Paris [if there and not in Eindhoven on 28 June – 02 July]
• Find ways to engage participants to fully commit to the conference (see above), for instance by preparing a “I am away at ISBA 2021” card one could post on whatever social or asocial networks one favours (but maybe not as one’s vacation email automated reply, unless the card is a few bytes…)

IMS-Bernoulli congress delayed [WC2020]

Just received the sad news that the 10th World Congress in Probability and Statistics (WC2020), jointly organized by the Bernoulli Society and IMS, in Seoul, 17-21 August 2020, must be delayed till next year. I expect the same to happen for JSM 2020 in Philly.