MCMSki IV, Jan. 6-8, 2014, Chamonix (news #7)

More exciting (and important!) news about MCMSki IV:

First, some if not all of the 9 invited and the 16 contributed sessions are about now documented by abstracts. The program is completely set! If you plan to present a poster, remember to send me by email (a) surname, name (institution): title as the subject, (b) abstract and keywords (and possibly a link to a paper) as the body of the mail, at your earliest convenience.

Second, ISBA, SBSS and the BayesComp section of ISBA are putting $11,000 together to support travel for young researchers (who also get special rates at registration). lf you are a young researcher and looking for travel support, please apply at your earliest convenience on the ISBA via the ISBA form. (Details on that page.) Deadline for applications is September 30, mind!

Last, I just made my own reservation of a rental flat in Chamonix and noticed the offers are not so numerous any longer, so make sure to check soon if you do not want to go through the Conference Centre reservation system. And also if you do since the number of rooms is limited.

JSM 2010 [day 3]

The same pattern as yesterday occurred, namely that the sessions that most interested me were all together at the 10:30 and 2pm slots, while there was no talk (besides the official ones) after 4pm… After another run around Stanley Park, I took the opportunity of being late for the first session to sit outside and to read the beginning of Francisco Samaniego’s book comparing Bayesian and frequentist inferences. The morning session was SAMSI sum-up about the spatio-temporal program they ran last year. I liked Noel Cressie’s analysis of a huge satellite data problem and the immense dimension reduction it brought. The most promising session of the day was however the afternoon’s Latent space models for network analysis, where Peter Hoff, David Bank and Purnamrita Sarkar gave different perspectives on this quite interesting modelling technique. (I was reflecting during the talks that this could bring a modelling revival of the old French “analyse de données” school, in that it was translating dependencies into distances…) After meeting the other editors of StatProb and grabbing a Revolution Analytic water-bottle at their party, I attended the SBSS mixer where I had a great time (except for the $9 beers) talking to old friends and meeting new ones.