a passage to & from India

Our trip from Paris (CDG) to Bengaluru got a wee bit (!) perturbed by 2x bad luck, with a first plane grounded for damages to a wing and a second plane flashing an alarm signal just as it was accelerating to take off, which induced an extra hour of tests, plus an unexpected long wait to get the e-visa at the Bengalore airport, resulting in an arrival in town at 5:30 am! A good thing that my talk was only the next day.

I was glad to be back at the (Tata) Indian Institute of Science and its wonderful campus for the IISA meeting (taking place alternately in India and in the US). The conference program was rich and with a large Bayesian component, but being sleep deprived and slightly sick did not help with my concentration during the talks… Had however nice discussions during the poster session, including one on a most unusual RJMCMC where the model-to-model transform was the identity. In a sense this voided (?) the need for RJMCMC, but it allowed for a fast & valid exploration of the different models.

Quite a contrast in my local lodging conditions, when compared with my previous visit,  since, rather than staying in the ideal visitors’ lodge located at the centre of the campus, I took the (bargain) offer (from IISA) of the nearby Sheraton (!) as the conference hotel with five star conditions, including a proper, outside, empty and non-heated swimming pool.

The (touristy) train trip to Mysore was most pleasant, on an air-conditioned carriage with food vendors proposing their wares all along the journey, great views of the countryside and an arrival sharp on time. The reverse trip to the airport was less successful as the FlyBus we took was crawling rather than flying, with heavy traffic all the way because/despite being New Year Eve’ning.  At some point, a truck carrying what looked like kindling was stuck in a pothole, blocking the highway, and a crane was brought on site to push the truck out of the hole, a strategy that surprisingly worked. But we managed to reach the airport just before midnight, when absolutely nothing happened in relation with the entry into 2023!

call for posters at BayesComp²³ satellite [AG:DC]

An urgent reminder that the early bird deadline for BayesComp²³ and the different satellites is 30 November (with a difference of $50) and also a call for poster presentations at our AG:DC (aka, Bayesian computing without exact likelihood) satellite workshop. Poster spots will be attributed to presenters on a first come – first served basis, so do not delay in sending me an abstract at my gmail account bayesianstatistics

ISBA 20.2.21

A second day which started earlier and more smoothly with a 100% local j-ISBA session. (Not counting the invigorating swim in Morgiou!) With talks by junior researchers from master to postdoc level, as this ISBA mirror meeting was primarily designed for them, so that they could all present their work, towards gaining more visibility for their research and facilitating more interactions with the participants. CIRM also insisted on this aspect of the workshop, which was well-attended.

I alas had to skip the poster session [and the joys of gather.town] despite skipping lunch [BND], due to organisational constraints. Then attended the Approximate Bayesian computation section, including one talk by Geoff Nicholls on confidence estimation for ABC, following upon the talk given by Kate last evening. And one by Florian Maire on learning the bound in accept-reject algorithms on the go, as in Caffo et al. (2002), which I found quite exciting and opening new possibilities, esp. if the Markov chain thus produced can be recycled towards unbiasedness without getting the constant right! For instance, by Rao-Blackwellisation, multiple mixtures, black box importance sampling, whatever. (This also reminded me of the earlier Goffinet et al. 1996.)

Followed by another Bayesian (modeling and) computation session. With my old friend Peter Müller talking about mixture inference with dependent priors (and a saturated colour scheme!), Matteo Ruggieri [who could not make it to CIRM!] on computable Bayesian inference for HMMs. Providing an impressive improvement upon particle filters for approximating the evidence. Also bringing the most realistic Chinese restaurant with conveyor belt! And Ming Yuan Zhou using optimal transport to define distance between distributions. With two different conditional distributions depending on which marginal is first fixed. And a connection with GANs (of course!).

And it was great to watch and listen to my friend Alicia Carriquiry talking on forensic statistics and the case for (or not?!) Bayes factors. And remembering Dennis Lindley. And my friend Jim Berger on frequentism versus Bayes! Consistency seems innocuous as most Bayes procedures are. Empirical coverage is another kind of consistency, isn’t it?

A remark I made when re-typing the program for CIRM is that there are surprisingly few talks about COVID-19 overall, maybe due to the program being mostly set for ISBA 2020 in Kunming. Maybe because we are more cautious than the competition…?!

And, at last, despite a higher density of boars around the CIRM facilities, no one got hurt yesterday! Unless one counts the impact of the French defeat at the Euro 2021 on the football fans here…

practical details on ISBA²⁰²¹

Remember that the [online]  ISBA 2021 conference will be a mixture of live talks, pre-recorded talks, and posters. All live-streaming will be via Zoom, with links integrated into the Whova platform.

1. Plenary talks (i.e., Foundational Lectures, Keynote Lectures, and Named Lectures) and all invited talks will be live-streamed during the corresponding sessions.
2. Contributed talks are prerecorded (available from June 10, 2021). During the live-streamed Contributed Sessions, each speaker will give a 5-min live recap of their contributed talk,  highlighting the main points, followed by live discussion and Q&A from the audience.
3. Contributed speakers who had optionally chosen to accompany their talk with a poster will present the poster [live] in their designated Poster Sessions. All Poster Sessions will be held on Gather.town, which will also serve as the virtual space for social times during the whole conference.
4. One week before the conference, Gather.town will go live and all posters will also become available then.
5. Speakers of all talk types will have the option to upload and post their slides on Whova starting one week before the conference [which I personally recommend as I find it too easy for my attention to drift off during an online and need to recheck earlier slides to reconnect!]

ISB@CIRM: through the looking glass

It’s now official!, thanks to the support of the Société Mathématique de France (SMF), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the Université Aix-Marseille, we are going to have a mirror workshop at CIRM, Marseille (France, not South Africa or Ohio!) gathering local Bayesians to attend ISBA 2021 together over the week of 28 June – 2 July, and share more than a virtual meeting room, while increasing the motivation to attend all sessions over a five day ultra-marathon! We also hope to have outdoor poster sessions around breaks.There is no registration fee and no support either, the only cost being the full-board on-site accommodation at CIRM to be paid upon arrival. Registration is open. Until we reach the upper limit set by the centre and depending on the dynamics of the pandemic (and of the administration). So feel free to apply if you are reasonably confident to be allowed and able to reach CIRM on the week of 28 June – 2 July. Which means travelling within the EU, at best.