COMPSTAT²⁰²²

I am taking part in [twice delayed] COMPSTAT 2022 this week, held in Bologna, virtually as my travel agenda is already quite heavy for the coming Fall Term. I sort of lost count but methinks this must be the fourth edition of COMPSTAT I am attending, the first one being Bristol in 1998, then Utrecht in 2000, and Paris in 2010. As it happens, all three plenary speakers are my friends and professional colleagues, namely  Holger Detter, Igor Pruenster, and Jean-Michel Zakoian. I am talking in  an Applied Computational Bayes session organised by Daniele Durante and Giacomo Zanella, although the talk is only remotely connected with my abstract from years ago:

Evidence approximation is a central object of Bayesian inference and despite numerous advances in the past decades, there still remain challenges to be met, especially when the sample size is large. We review here some robust solutions like the reverse logistic regression and a modified harmonic mean estimator, before proposing a related algorithm for Bayesian model choice.

a year ago, a world away

dear me! [on strike]

missing [thumb] category

I had a fairly uneventful trip to Kolkata today, except for a rather long wait at the e-visa station in Delhi where the young agent in the booth was at a loss on how to handle my missing thumb and kept returning to a senior agent for instructions! As they were speaking Hindi, I could not understand precisely the exchanges but he was told to enter “missing” and when this failed, “disabled” which worked out fine! The Indian Statistical Institute is locate quite a fair distance north from the centre of Kolkata and I searched in vain for a tea dealer in the immediate vicinity tonight. (Walking ten minutes in the street was most likely equivalent to smoking a full pack of cigarettes!!! I am glad I did not bring running gear as this would have been borderline suicidal… (On the flight back, the security agent was equally interested in my absent thumb, enquiring how I had lost it.)

Great North Road [book review]

As I was unsure of the Internet connections and of the more than likely delays I would face during my trip to India, I went fishing for a massive novel on Amazon and eventually ordered Peter Hamilton’s Great North Road, a 1088 pages behemoth! I fear the book qualifies as space opera, with the conventional load of planet invasions, incomprehensible and infinitely wise aliens, gateways for instantaneous space travels, and sentient biospheres. But the core of the story is very, very, Earth-bound, with a detective story taking place in a future Newcastle that is not so distant from now in many ways. (Or even from the past as the 2012 book did not forecast Brexit…) With an occurrence of the town moor where I went running a few years ago.

The book is mostly well-designed, with a plot gripping enough to keep me hooked for Indian evenings in Kolkata and most of the flight back. I actually finished it just before landing in Paris. There is no true depth in the story, though, and the science fiction part is rather lame: a very long part of the detective plot is spent on the hunt for a taxi by an army of detectives, a task one would think should be delegated to a machine-learning algorithm and solved in a nano-second or so. The themes heavily borrow from those of classics like Avatar, Speaker for the Dead, Hyperion [very much Hyperion!], Alien… And from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for an hardcore heroin who is perfect at anything she undertakes.  Furthermore, the Earth at the centre of this extended universe is very close to its present version, with English style taxis, pub culture, and a geopolitic structure of the World pretty much unchanged. Plus main brands identical to currents ones (Apple, BMW, &tc), to the point it sounds like sponsored links! And no clue of a major climate change despite the continued use of fuel engines. Nonetheless, an easy read when stuck in an airport or a plane seat for several hours.