2021 Whova Meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis

The website for the incoming ISBA 2021 meeting is now operational and open to all! The program is ready, as well, with short courses starting on 23 June. And the main event on 28 June, with very long days, from 5:15am till 9:30pm in (US) Eastern Time (EDT, ie EST-05:00, UTC-06:00, CET-06:00, IST-9:30, CDT-11:00, JST-13:00, AEST-14:00). The number of registered participants is currently above 1700!, which shows the positive side of having a free on-line event since everyone (with an Internet connection!) interested can participate. On the negative side, namely the limited human interactions and the challenge of staying focussed 24/5, a solution stands in creating local clusters where a group could attend together the sessions. Provided local health policies allow. I am still working on gathering at CIRM, Marseille, if the centre reopens on 27 June. And am happy to broadcast any initiative to this effect.

ABC in Svalbard [the day after]

The following and very kind email was sent to me the day after the workshop

thanks once again to make the conference possible. It was full of interesting studies within a friendly environment, I really enjoyed it. I think it is not easy to make a comfortable and inspiring conference in a remote version and across two continents, but this has been the result. I hope to be in presence (maybe in Svalbard!) the next edition.

and I fully agree to the talks behind full of interest and diverse. And to the scheduling of the talks across antipodal locations a wee bit of a challenge, mostly because of the daylight saving time  switches! And to seeing people together being a comfort (esp. since some were enjoying wine and cheese!).

I nonetheless found the experience somewhat daunting, only alleviated by sharing a room with a few others in Dauphine and having the opportunity to react immediately (and off-the-record) to the on-going talk. As a result I find myself getting rather scared by the prospect of the incoming ISBA 2021 World meeting. With parallel sessions and an extensive schedule from 5:30am till 9:30pm (in EDT time, i.e. GMT-4) that nicely accommodates the time zones of all speakers. I am thus thinking of (safely) organising a local cluster to attend the conference together and recover some of the social interactions that are such an essential component of [real] conferences, including students’ participation. It will of course depend on whether conference centres like CIRM reopen before the end of June. And if enough people see some appeal in this endeavour. In the meanwhile, remember to register for ISBA 2021 and for free!, before 01 May.

news from ISBA

Some news and reminders from the latest ISBA Bulletin (which also contains an obituary of Don Fraser by Christian Genest):

• Remember that the registration for ISBA 2021 is free till 1 May! The conference is fully online, from 28 June to 2 July
• the Bayesian young statisticians meeting BAYSM 21 will take place online, 1-3 September
• the useR! 2021 conference will also take place online, July 5-9
  
• the MHC2021 (Mixtures, Hidden Markov models, Clustering) conference will take place physically and online at Orsay, France, 2-4 June

[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…)

a journal of the plague year [mo’vember reviews]

Read a short manifest [in French], Décarcérer [Uncarcerate] written by Sylvain Lhuissier about the uselessness of the carceral system and the potential alternatives. Much easier to read than Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir, obviously, but the author is also an actor in the construction of such alternatives in France. Most interestingly, he points out that the arrival of the COVID pandemic, with overpopulated prisons being obvious hotspots, led to an almost instantaneous reduction of the carceral population thus brought below its nominal capacity, without a ensuing explosion in criminal activities.

Made a few jars of green tomato marmalade, as there were a few left when I cleaned my vegetable patch. With little sugar and some peppers to stand between marmalade and chutney. And found a bakery cooking kouignou amman almost on my bike path, although the calories input they provide would require a much longer détour..! And also had a long discussion (at a safe distance) with a tea dealer, who made me taste a unique white Pu Ehr from Laos. She also had many tips on Kunming (even though it sounds less and less likely ISBA 2020 will take place there.)

Read a touching novel [in French] by Akira Mizubayashi, Âme brisée [Broken soul], a moving story around music, deracination, lutherie, childhood memories, travelling between France, Japan and China. (Judging from the summaries of his other books, the themes sound central to the author’s work.) 

Watched a few episodes of The Magicians (although Season 1 came out in… 2015!), although I had not much enjoyed the book (volume 1). And found them an improvement, considerably so, with most characters having enough of a depth and flaws aplenty to compensate for the still terrible plot with its Narnia-esque hidden universe. The central characters Quentin and Alice are pleasantly making themselves quite antipathetic. But the inherent dependence on the weak book plot, a growing boredom (and the terrifying perspective of an enormous number of episodes!) made me stop from pursuing the experiment!