Elisabeth Gassiat, a path in modern statistics [conférence]

Next Spring (31 May-02 June 2023), there will be a conference at Institut de mathématique d’Orsay in honour of our friend Elisabeth Gassiat and her contributions to statistics over the past 35 years, with Emmanuel Candès (Stanford University), Alexandra Carpentier (Universität Potsdam), Fabrice Gamboa (Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier), Alice Guionnet (ENS Lyon), Ramon van Handel (Princeton University), Thi Thu Huong Hoang (EDF), Eric Moulines (École Polytechnique), Richard Nickl (University of Cambridge), Judith Rousseau (University of Oxford / Université Paris Dauphine – PSL), Adeline Samson (Université Grenoble Alpes), Jean-Christophe Thalabard (Université Paris Cité), and Aad van der Vaart (TU Delft) as invited speakers. Registration is free and compulsory!

bravo, Dr. Robert!!!

Last Friday, our daughter Rachel attended the graduation ceremony for her medical school cohort master graduation. On the Saclay campus next to ENSAE (and so did we!), with nice and short talks by medicine professors and the University President, with a massive (?!) conflict of interest as her own daughter was part of this cohort!  And learned that she will work her first medical internship semester in French Guiana, next month, as part of her choice of a medical specialisation in internal medicine in the French Caribbean departments, over the five next years. Congrats to her and all of her fantastic friends for this massive achievement!!! And [fatherly and a wee bit anxious!] best wishes for this new and exciting period of her life!!! (And concerned thoughts for her female doctor colleagues at the French Institute for Mothers and Children in Kabul, like Dr. Arifa and Dr. Shoranghaize. interviewed in Le Monde the same day.)

climbing encounters

A nice if easy climbing morn on Éperon de Bouchier (à ne pas confondre avec Crochet de Boucher!) a week ago with a local guide, François, who happened to be a formidable character (even conditioning on him being guide). He left school at 14 to become a car mechanic, join the French Navy at 16, caught tuberculosis on a Navy basis, was sent to the Alps for recovery, caught a fatal and definite mountain attraction while there, got training supported by the Navy for an higher mechanic degree, took qualification courses to become a French mountain guide, started being interested in learning techniques and abilities through his training ski schools, experimented new teaching methods with kids from the Marseille suburbs,  eventually joined a Master in biomechanics and ergonomy at Orsay and ended up with a thesis on the topic, worked with French ski federation and a French ski brand, and is still guiding, training and researching despite having passed the retirement age! A wonderful chance encounter, with the facility of the route making chatting not an issue. (Except that some puritan ayatollah had recently removed most of the bolts, which did not make things harder in the end but exhibited an absurd degree of self-righteousness on a route that easy…)

And then an even more rewarding climb today with another local guide, Cathy, who gave me a great and profitable climbing lesson for over three hours, allowing me to reach a higher climbing level than I had previously achieved on an outside route. With a high degree of pedagogy and support. I ended up fairly tired, but exhilaratedly so!

MHC2020

There is a conference on mixtures (M) and hidden Markov models (H) and clustering (C) taking place in Orsay on June 17-19, next year. Registration is free if compulsory. With about twenty confirmed speakers. (Irrelevant as the following remark is, this is the opportunity to recall the conference on mixtures I organised in Aussois 25 years before! Which website is amazingly still alive at Duke, thanks to Mike West, my co-organiser along with Kathryn Roeder and Gilles Celeux. When checking the abstracts, I found only two presenters common to both conferences, Christophe Biernaki and Jiahua Chen. And alas several names of departed friends.)

permanent position for research on computational statistics and “omics” data

There is an opening at the French agronomy and genetics research centre, INRA, for a permanent research position on the country campus of Joyu-en-Josas, south-west of Paris, with focus on computational statistics (incl. machine-learning) and collaborations on omics data. The deadline is March 4. (The procedure is somewhat involved, as detailed in the guide for candidates.) I want to stress this is a highly attractive position in terms of academic surroundings (research only campus, nearby Paris=Saclay and Orsay campuses), of location (Paris in the fields), and of status since permanent really means permanent!