le grand amphithéâtre de l’Université de Lyon

The talks of the statlearn 2017 conference took place in an amazing 19th Century amphitheatre that looked in much better conditions than the corresponding amphitheatre of La Sorbonne. After checking on-line, I found that this place had suffered a major fire in 1999 and had been renovated since then.

The main wall features a very academic painting by Jean-Joseph Weerts representing a rhethoric competition in Lugdunum (the hill of the god Lug, in Latin), under the Roman emperor Caligula. (It is hard to imagine this was painted at the time of the Impressionist revolution!) Which creates a huge distraction from listening to the first talk when one enters this room, as there are many stories woven into the painting, including the fate of the poor rethoricians, thrown in the Rhône by the emperor’s guards!

Statlearn17, Lyon

Today and tomorrow, I am attending the Statlearn17 conference in Lyon, France. Which is a workshop with one-hour talks on statistics and machine learning. And which makes for the second workshop on machine learning in two weeks! Yesterday there were two tutorials in R, but I only took the train to Lyon this morning: it will be a pleasant opportunity to run tomorrow through a city I have not truly ever visited, if X’ed so many times driving to the Alps. Interestingly, the trip started in Paris with me sitting in the train next to another speaker at the conference, despite having switched seat and carriage with another passenger! Speaker whom I did not know beforehand and could only identify him by his running R codes at 300km/h.