Sequential Monte Carlo 2015 workshop

An announcement for the SMC 2015 workshop:

Sequential Monte Carlo methods (also known as particle filters) have revolutionized the on-line and off-line analysis of data in fields as diverse as target tracking, computer vision, financial modelling, brain imagery, or population ecology. Their popularity stems from the fact that they have made possible to solve numerically many complex problems that were previously intractable.

The aim of the SMC 2015 workshop, in the spirit of SMC2006 and SMC2012, is to gather scientists from all areas of science interested in the theory, methodology or application of Sequential Monte Carlo methods.

SMC 2015 will take place at ENSAE, Paris, on August 26-28 2015.

The organising committee

Nicolas Chopin ENSAE, Paris

Adam Johansen, Warwick University
Thomas Schön, Uppsala University

 

statistical challenges in neuroscience

Yet another workshop around! Still at Warwick, organised by Simon Barthelmé, Nicolas Chopin and Adam Johansen  on the theme of statistical aspects of neuroscience. Being nearby I attended a few lectures today but most talks are more topical than my current interest in the matter, plus workshop fatigue starts to appear!, and hence I will keep a low attendance for the rest of the week to take advantage of my visit here to make some progress in my research and in the preparation of the teaching semester. (Maybe paradoxically I attended a non-neuroscience talk by listening to Richard Wilkinson’s coverage of ABC methods, with an interesting stress on meta-models and the link with computer experiments. Given that we are currently re-revising our paper with Matt Moore and Kerrie Mengersen (and now Chris Drovandi), I find interesting to see a sort of convergence in our community towards a re-re-interpretation of ABC as producing an approximation of the distribution of the summary statistic itself, rather than of the original data, using auxiliary or indirect or pseudo-models like Gaussian processes. (Making the link with Mark Girolami’s talk this morning.)

big data, big models, it is a big deal! [posters & talks]

Great poster session yesterday night and at lunch today. Saw an ABC poster (by Dennis Prangle, following our random forest paper) and several MCMC posters (by Marco Banterle, who actually won one of the speed-meeting mini-project awards!, Michael Betancourt, Anne-Marie Lyne, Murray Pollock), and then a rather different poster on Mondrian forests, that generalise random forests to sequential data (by Balaji Lakshminarayanan).  The talks all had interesting aspects or glimpses about big data and some of the unnecessary hype about it (them?!), along with exposing the nefarious views of Amazon to become the Earth only seller!, but I particularly enjoyed the astronomy afternoon and even more particularly Steve Roberts sweep through astronomy machine-learning. Steve characterised variational Bayes as picking your choice of sufficient statistics, which made me wonder why there were no stronger connections between variational Bayes and ABC. He also quoted the book The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery by Tony Hey as putting forward interesting notions. (A book review for the next vacations?!) And also mentioned zooniverse, a citizens science website I was not aware of. With a Bayesian analysis of the learning curve of those annotating citizens (in the case of supernovae classification). Big deal, indeed!!!

big data, big models, it is a big deal!

off to Bangalore

I am off to Bangalore for a few days, taking part in an Indo-French workshop on statistics and mathematical biology run by the Indo-French Centre for Applied Mathematics (IFCAM).

understanding complex and large industrial data (UCLID 2014)

Just received this announcement of the UCLID 2014 conference in Lancaster, July 1-2 2014:

Understanding Complex and Large Industrial Data 2014, or UCLID, is a workshop which aims to provide an opportunity for academic researchers and industrial practitioners to work together and share ideas on the fast developing field of ‘big data’ analysis. This is a growing area of importance within academia and industry where the potential for new research and economic impact has been recognised.

UCLID 2014 is hosted by the STOR-i Doctoral Training Centre, which is based at Lancaster University. STOR-i’s unique position between academia and industry provides an ideal venue for this event, as this workshop builds upon STOR-i’s philosophy of cross-collaboration and implementation of new research within the wider community.

ABC in Sydney, July 3-4, 2014!!!

After ABC in Paris in 2009, ABC in London in 2011, and ABC in Roma last year, things are accelerating since there will be—as I just learned—  an ABC in Sydney next July (not June as I originally typed, thanks Robin!). The workshop on the current developments of ABC methodology thus leaves Europe to go down-under and to take advantage of the IMS Meeting in Sydney on July 7-10, 2014. Hopefully, “ABC in…” will continue its tour of European capitals in 2015! To keep up with an unbroken sequence of free workshops, Scott Sisson has managed to find support so that attendance is free of charge (free as in “no registration fee at all”!) but you do need to register as space is limited. While I would love to visit UNSW and Sydney once again and attend the workshop, I will not, getting ready for Cancún and our ABC short course there.