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!]

ABC in Svalbard [#0]

It has started! In case you need the link to follow the talks, here it is! And most slides and past talks are also on-line.

[de]quarantined by slideshare

A follow-up episode to the SlideShare m’a tuer [sic] saga: After the 20 November closure of my xianblog account and my request for an explanation, I was told by Linkedin that a complaint has been made about one of my talks for violation of copyright. Most surprisingly, at least at first, it was about the slides for the graduate lectures I gave ten years ago at CREST on (re)reading Jaynes’ Probability Theory. While the slides contain a lot of short quotes from the Logic of Science, somewhat necessarily since I discuss the said book, there are also many quotes from Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability and “t’is but a scratch” on the contents of this lengthy book… Plus, the pdf file appears to be accessible on several sites, including one with an INRIA domain. Since I had to fill a “Counter-Notice of Copyright Infringement” to unlock the rest of the depository, I just hope no legal action is going to be taken about this lecture. But I remain puzzled at the reasoning behind the complaint, unwilling to blame radical Jaynesians for it! As an aside, here are the registered 736 views of the slides for the past year:

quarantined by slideshare

Just found out that SlideShare has closed my account for “violating SlideShare Terms of Service”! As I have no further detail (and my xianblog account is inaccessible) I have contacted SlideShare to get an explanation for this inexplicable cancellation and hopefully (??) can argue my case. If not the hundred plus slide presentations that were posted there and linked on the ‘Og will become unavailable. I seem to remember this happened to me once before so maybe there is hope to invert the decision presumably made by an AI using the wrong prior or algorithm!

my talk in Newcastle

I will be talking (or rather zooming) at the statistics seminar at the University of Newcastle this afternoon on the paper Component-wise approximate Bayesian computation via Gibbs-like steps that just got accepted by Biometrika (yay!). Sadly not been there for real, as I would have definitely enjoyed reuniting with friends and visiting again this multi-layered city after discovering it for the RSS meeting of 2013, which I attended along with Jim Hobert and where I re-discussed the re-Read DIC paper. Before traveling south to Warwick to start my new appointment there. (I started with a picture of Seoul taken from the slopes of Gwanaksan about a year ago as a reminder of how much had happened or failed to happen over the past year…Writing 2019 as the year was unintentional but reflected as well on the distortion of time induced by the lockdowns!)