news from PCI

another mirror of ABC in Gre[e]noble

There will now be a second mirror workshop of ABC in Grenoble. Taking place at the Université de Montpellier, more precisely at the Alexander Grothendieck Montpellier Institute, Building 9, room 430 (4th floor), Triolet Campus. It is organised by my friend Jean-Michel Marin. Great to see a mirror at one of the major breeding places of ABC, where I personally heard of ABC for the first time and met several of the main A[B]Ctors..! The dates are 19-20 March, with talks transmitted from 9am to 5am [GMT+1]. Since the video connection can accommodate 1918 more mirrors, if anyone else is interested in organising another mirror, please contact me for technical details.

crowd-based peer review

In clear connection with my earlier post on Peer Community In… and my visit this week to Montpellier towards starting a Peer Community In Computational Statistics, I read a tribune in Nature (1 June, p.9) by the editor of Synlett, Benjamin List, describing an experiment conducted by this journal in chemical synthesis. The approach was to post (volunteered) submitted papers on a platform accessible to a list of 100 reviewers, nominated by the editorial board, who could anonymously comment on the papers and read others’ equally anonymous comments. With a 72 hours deadline! According to Benjamin List (and based on  a large dataset of … 10 papers!), the outcome of the experiment is one of better quality return than with traditional reviewing policies. While Peer Community In… does not work exactly this way, and does not aim at operating as a journal, it is exciting and encouraging to see such experiments unfold!

trip to Montpellier

Last week, I flew down to Montpellier for two days of work on ABC model choice with Jean-Michel Marin and Pierre Pudlo. Although we missed the COLT 2014 deadline, we are now close to completing this work that will propose a rather radical change in our advocacy of how ABC model choice should be conducted. We actually spent the second day on the wonderful campus of INRA at Montferrier-sur-Lez, just outside Montpellier, discussing of the implications of this approach with our friends at CBGP, Jean-Marie Cornuet and Arnaud Estoup. With possible impact on the DIYABC software. It was a very profitable trip (not mentioning tasting great Grés de Montpellier wine!) and I hope to manage completing the paper with Pierre during the next week in Banff. Unfortunately, when I came back to my train station, I found some idiots had a go at my bike and bent the back wheel which then needed to be replaced…

tenured research position on ABC in Paris!

Just to make sure this fabulous announcement has not gone undetected: there is a permanent research (I repeat, permanent research!) position in statistics is open at AgroParisTech/INRA (a French institute/school on biology, agronomy, veterinary sciences, environmental sciences) with the profile ‘Approximate inference methods for complex systems’ (Hence my title!). Applications must be received by February 28th. See here for more details on the profile and there for the application process. Please contact Eric PARENT for further information. (There are other tenured positions posted by INRA, and there will be a regular lecturer position at Paris-Dauphine opening soon.)