The New Yorker [Dec. 12, 2022]

MCMC postdoc positions at Bocconi

[A call for postdoc candidates to work in Milano with Giacomo Zanella in the coming years under ERC funding. In case you are interested with a postdoctoral position with me at Paris Dauphine on multi-agent decision-making, data sharing, and fusion algorithms, do not hesitate to contact me, the official call for applications should come up soon!]

Three postdoc positions available at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy), under the supervision of Giacomo Zanella and funded by the ERC Starting Grant “Provable Scalability for high-dimensional Bayesian Learning”. Details and links to apply available online.

The deadline for application is 28/02/2023 and the planned starting date is 01/05/2023 (with some flexibility). Initial contracts are for 1 year and are extendable for further years under mutual agreement.

Candidates will conduct research on computational aspects of statistical and machine learning methods, with a particular focus on Bayesian methodologies. The research activity, both in terms of specific topic and research approach, can adapt to the profile and interests of the successful candidates. Beyond working with the supervisor and coauthors on topics related to the grant project (see here and there for more details on the research topics of the supervisor and grant project), candidates will get the chance to interact with various faculty members, postdocs and PhD students of the Stats&ML group at Bocconi (see e.g. researchers at Bocconi).

Interested candidates can write to giacomo zanella at unibocconi for more information about the positions.

All about that [Detective] Bayes [seminar]

On 10 January 2023, at 14:00, Campus Pierre et Marie Curie (Sorbonne Université), Room 15.16-309, an All about that Bayes seminar presentation by Daniele Durante, visiting Paris Dauphine this month:

Daniele Durante (Bocconi University) – Detective Bayes: Bayesian nonparametric stochastic block modeling of criminal networks

Europol recently defined criminal networks as a modern version of the Hydra mythological creature, with covert structure and multifaceted evolutions. Indeed, relationships data among criminals are subject to measurement errors, structured missingness patterns, and exhibit a complex combination of an unknown number of core-periphery, assortative and disassortative structures that may encode key architectures of the criminal organization. The coexistence of these noisy block patterns limits the reliability of community detection algorithms routinely-used in criminology, thereby leading to overly-simplified and possibly biased reconstructions of organized crime topologies. In this seminar, I will present a number of model-based solutions which aim at covering these gaps via a combination of stochastic block models and priors for random partitions arising from Bayesian nonparametrics. These include Gibbs-type priors, and random partition priors driven by the urn scheme of a hierarchical normalized completely random measure. Product-partition models to incorporate criminals’ attributes, and zero-inflated Poisson representations accounting for weighted edges and secrecy strategies, will be also discussed. Collapsed Gibbs samplers for posterior computation are presented, and refined strategies for estimation, prediction, uncertainty quantification and model selection will be outlined. Results are illustrated in an application to an Italian Mafia network, where the proposed models unveil a structure of the criminal organization mostly hidden to state-of-the-art alternatives routinely used in criminology. I will conclude the seminar with ideas on how to learn the evolutionary history of the criminal organization from the relationship data among its criminals via a novel combination of latent space models for network data and phylogenetic trees.

JB³ [Junior Bayes beyond the borders]

Bocconi and j-ISBA are launcing a webinar series for and by junior Bayesian researchers. The first talk is on 25 June, 25 at 3pm UTC/GMT (5pm CET) with Francois-Xavier Briol, one of the laureates of the 2020 Savage Thesis Prize (and a former graduate of OxWaSP, the Oxford-Warwick doctoral training program), on Stein’s method for Bayesian computation, with as a discussant Nicolas Chopin.

As pointed out on their webpage,

Due to the importance of the above endeavor, JB³ will continue after the health emergency as an annual series. It will include various refinements aimed at increasing the involvement of the whole junior Bayesian community and facilitating a broader participation to the online seminars all over the world via various online solutions.

Thanks to all my friends at Bocconi for running this experiment!

A Milano [not jatp]

Today, I went to Milano for 13 hours to give a seminar at l’Università Bocconi. Where I thus gave a talk on Testing via mixtures (using the same slides as at ISBA last Spring). It was the first time I was in Milano (and thus at Bocconi) for more than a transfer to MCMski or to Pavia and it was great to walk through the city. And of course to meet and share with many friends there. While I glimpsed the end of the sunrise on the Italian Alps (near Monte Rosa?!), I was too late on my way back for the sunset.