Category: University life

Prairie chair

Today is the launching day of PRAIRIE, one of the four Instituts Interdisciplinaires d’Intelligence Artificielle (3IA) supported by the French government. Taking place in Paris Dauphine, with Yann Le Cun as guest speaker. I have been fortunate to be endowed with one of these chairs for the coming years, along with my CEREMADE colleagues Laurent […]

Antarctic sabbatical

Airbnb is supporting 5 volunteers that wish to join next December environmental scientist Kirstie Jones-Williams, from the University of Exeter, on a scientific expedition in Antarctica, investigating the presence of microplastics there. The deadline for applications  is 11:59pm EDT on 8 October 2019. (I wish I could, but the news came a bit late to […]

Christian Robert is giving a talk in Jussieu tomorrow

My namesake Christian (Yann) Robert (CREST) is giving a seminar tomorrow in Jussieu (Université Pierre & Marie Curie, couloir 16-26, salle 209), between 2 and 3, on composite likelihood estimation method for hierarchical Archimedean copulas defined with multivariate compound distributions. Here is the abstract: We consider the family of hierarchical Archimedean copulas obtained from multivariate […]

NeurIPS without visa

I came by chance upon this 2018 entry in Synced that NeurIPS now takes place in Canada between Montréal and Vancouver primarily because visas to Canada are easier to get than visas to the USA, even though some researchers still get difficulties in securing theirs. Especially researchers from some African countries, which is exposed  in […]

EU without education is like a bird without wings [apologies to ostriches]

[Reposting a call for keeping education and research in the EU commission denomination:] The candidates for the new EU commissioners were presented last week. In the new commission the areas of education and research are not explicitly represented anymore and instead are subsumed under the “innovation and youth” title. This emphasizes economic exploitability (i.e. “innovation”) […]

ABC in Clermont-Ferrand

Today I am taking part in a one-day workshop at the Université of Clermont Auvergne on ABC. With applications to cosmostatistics, along with Martin Kilbinger [with whom I worked on PMC schemes] Florent Leclerc and Grégoire Aufort. This should prove a most exciting day! (With not enough time to run up Puy de Dôme in […]

No review this summer

A recent editorial in Nature was a declaration by a biologist from UCL on her refusal to accept refereeing requests during the summer (or was it the summer break), which was motivated by a need to reconnect with her son. Which is a good enough reason (!), but reflects sadly on the increasing pressure on […]

two positions at UBC

A long-time friend at UBC pointed out to me the opening of two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions at the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2020 or January 1, 2021. The deadline for applications is October 18, 2019. Statistics at UBC is an […]

the three i’s of poverty

Today I made a “quick” (10h door to door!) round trip visit to Marseille (by train) to take part in the PhD thesis defense (committee) of Edwin Fourrier-Nicolaï, which title was Poverty, inequality and redistribution: an econometric approach. While this was mainly a thesis in economics, meaning defending some theory on inequalities based on East […]

email footprint

While I was wondering (im Salzburg) at the carbon impact of sending emails with an endless cascade of the past history of exchanges and replies, I found this (rather rudimentary) assessment  that, while standard emails had an average impact of 4g, those with long attachments could cost 50g, quoting from Burners-Lee, leading to the fairly […]

9 pitfalls of data science [book review]

I received The 9 pitfalls of data science by Gary Smith [who has written a significant number of general public books on personal investment, statistics and AIs] and Jay Cordes from OUP for review a few weeks ago and read it on my trip to Salzburg. This short book contains a lot of anecdotes and […]

dodging bullets, IEDs, and fingerprint detection at SimStat19

I attended a fairly interesting forensic science session at SimStat 2019 in Salzburg as it concentrated on evidence and measures of evidence rather than on strict applications of Bayesian methodology to forensic problems. Even though American administrations like the FBI or various police departments were involved. It was a highly coherent session and I had […]

likelihood-free inference by ratio estimation

“This approach for posterior estimation with generative models mirrors the approach of Gutmann and Hyvärinen (2012) for the estimation of unnormalised models. The main difference is that here we classify between two simulated data sets while Gutmann and Hyvärinen (2012) classified between the observed data and simulated reference data.” A 2018 arXiv posting by Owen […]

Nature tidbits

Before returning a few older issues of Nature to the coffee room of the maths department, a quick look brought out the few following items of interests, besides the great cover above: France showing the biggest decline in overal output among the top 10 countries in the Nature Index Annual Tables. A tribune again the […]

research position in Bristol

Christophe Andrieu is seeking a senior research associate (reference ACAD103715) at the University of Bristol to work on new approaches to Bayesian data science. The selected candidate would work with Prof. Christophe Andrieu (School of Mathematics) and Prof. Mark Beaumont (Life Science) on new approaches to tackle Bayesian inference in complex statistical models arising in […]

off to SimStat2019, Salzburg

Today, I am off to Salzburg for the SimStat 2019 workshop, or more formally the 10th International Workshop on Simulation and Statistics, where I give a talk on ABC. The program of the workshop is quite diverse and rich and so I do not think I will have time to take advantage of the Hohe […]

deadlines for BayesComp’2020

While I have forgotten to send a reminder that August 15 was the first deadline of BayesComp 2020 for the early registrations, here are further deadlines and dates BayesComp 2020 occurs on January 7-10 2020 in Gainesville, Florida, USA Registration is open with regular rates till October 14, 2019 Deadline for submission of poster proposals […]