partenza per Venezia²³

This week I will be visiting Roberto Casarin at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, with presumably a quieter atmosphere than the past year, when I stayed there during Carnevale. Staying at the same flat as before in one of the quiet calli near the university.

keep meetings hybrid

I was reading the latest ISBA Bulletin and the tribune by ISBA President Sudipto Banerjee celebrating the return to the physical ISBA World meeting, along with worries about participants who caught COVID there. (Unfortunately, one good friend of mine experienced symptoms that went beyond the mild cold-like ones I zoomed through a few days ago.) This particular issue of creating a COVID cluster [during coffee breaks?!] provides [me with] one further argument for my supporting hybrid and multimodal meetings on a general basis. Which should [imho] appear in the proposals for the 2026 and 2028 World Meetings (deadline on 31 October)…(The 2024 meeting in Venezia will certainly involve hybridicity! As will BayesComp in Levi.) Discussing the topic with others in some scientific committees recently made me realise this was not such a shared perspective, from reasons varying from worrying about balancing the budget, to zoom fatigue, to the added value of informal interactions. Still, there also are reasons for hybridising our meetings, from reduced travel impact, to more inclusiveness,  on geographical, diversity, affordability, seniority grounds. Holding hybrid conferences with multiple regional mirrors allows for a potentially higher degree of interaction and local input.  And a minimal organisational effort.

diario dell’anno della peste³

Had a fantastic fortnight in Venezia, when visiting Roberto Casarin at Ca’Foscari. Living in the immediate vicinity of the campus meant enjoying a very quiet part of the city, not that Venezia was particularly crowded (except for the weekend which happened to be the beginning of a low-key Carnevale). I also managed to join the local swimming pool and thus enjoy the earliest morn session, while Xing daily on the way back the same people walking their kids to school or going to work.Read A history of what comes next by Sylvain Neuvel and part of Comes tumbling down by Seanan McGuire. Both books free from Tor.com. The former was nothing close to great, with an alien twist to the space conquest history and incomprehensible goals for a line of superheroes… The latter was near incomprehensible, albeit a Hugo Award 2021, but it is only when writing this post that I realised this was the fifth volume in a series. It may be that I will make an attempt at the first later, despite this inauspicious start!

Watched two further Korean TV series, Inspector Koo and Mad Dogs, the former being more realistic and mature than other K dramas, albeit with a super intelligent duo and a desintegration of the scenario structure as the story unfolds. The later is much more standard and not particularly worth recommending.

il cielo il limite [jatp]

Bayesian restricted likelihood with insufficient statistic [slides]

A great Bayesian Analysis webinar this afternoon with well-balanced presentations by Steve MacEachern and John Lewis, and original discussions by Bertrand Clarke and Fabrizio Rugieri. Which attracted 122 participants. I particularly enjoyed Bertrand’s points that likelihoods were more general than models [made in 6 different wordings!] and that this paper was closer to the M-open perspective. I think I eventually got the reason why the approach could be seen as an ABC with ε=0, since the simulated y’s all get the right statistic, but this presentation does not bring a strong argument in favour of the restricted likelihood approach, when considering the methodological and computational effort. The discussion also made me wonder if tools like VAEs could be used towards approximating the distribution of T(y) conditional on the parameter θ. This is also an opportunity to thank my friend Michele Guindani for his hard work as Editor of Bayesian Analysis and in particular for keeping the discussion tradition thriving!