Xi'an's Og

Today, I will spend my day in thesis defenses, as I take part in a defense committee this morning at Supéléc, about a thesis written by Alireza Roodaki on a new approach to trans-dimensional MCMC for mixtures of distributions. Rather than a new way to simulate from posterior distributions with a varying number of components, the thesis concentrates on the post-simulation processing of the outcome of the simulation, constructing an object similar to the point process representation of Matthew Stephens where components have a meaning across varying dimensions. An interesting and novel perspective. The afternoon, I am part of another defense committee for the habilitation of Fadoua Balabdaoui, my colleague in Paris-Dauphine. Fadoua is working in non-parametric statistics, under shape constraints, but has a wide range of interests and publications that fully justify an habilitation degree at this stage of her career. (Habilitation is a degree required in France and Germany to become a Full Professor and to autonomously advise PhD students.)

This entry was posted on May 14, 2012 at 12:12 am and is filed under Statistics, University life with tags defense, habilitation, PhD thesis, Supéléc, Université Paris Dauphine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.