Archive for AISTATS 2014
skyndimynd frá Íslandi (#3)
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags AISTATS 2014, Arnarstapi, cliffs, Iceland, Snaefell, volcanoes on April 24, 2014 by xi'an
skyndimynd frá Íslandi (#2)
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags AISTATS 2014, ashes, Dyrhólaey, Iceland, Vik on April 23, 2014 by xi'an
AISTATS 2014 (day #1)
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AISTATS 2014, Amazon, Þingvellir, Iceland, machine learning, Phoenix on April 23, 2014 by xi'an
First day at AISTATS 2014! After three Icelandic vacations days driving (a lot) and hinkg (too little) around South- and West-Iceland, I joined close to 300 attendees for this edition of the AISTATS conference series. I was quite happy to be there, if only because I had missed the conference last year (in Phoenix) and did not want this to become a tradition… Second, the mix of statistics, artificial intelligence and machine learning that characterises this conference is quite exciting, if challenging at time. What I most appreciated in this discovery of the conference is the central importance of the poster session, most talks being actually introductions to or oral presentations of posters! I find this feature terrific enough (is there such a notion as “terrific enough”?!) worth adopting in future conferences I am involved in. I just wish I had managed to tour the whole collection of posters today… The (first and) plenary lecture was delivered by Peter Bühlman, who spoke about a compelling if unusual (for me) version of causal inference. This was followed by sessions on Gaussian processes, graphical models, and mixed data sources. One highlight talk was the one by Marc Deisenroth, who showed impressive robotic fast learning based on Gaussian processes. At the end of this full day, I also attended an Amazon mixer where I learned about Amazon‘s entry on the local market, where it seems the company is getting a better picture of the current and future state of the U.S. economy than governmental services, thanks to a very fine analysis of the sales and entries on Amazon‘s entry. Then it was time to bike “home” on my rental bike, in the setting sun…
skyndimynd frá Íslandi
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags AISTATS 2014, Akranes, Iceland, Icelandic horses, volcanoes on April 22, 2014 by xi'an
a day for comments
Posted in Mountains, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AISTATS 2014, Bayesian variable selection, Brad Carlin, Cuillin ridge, Gaussian mixture, Gibbs sampler, hierarchical models, Iceland, ICML, Langevin MCMC algorithm, MCMC, Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, mixtures, model complexity, penalisation, reference priors, Reykjavik, RJMCMC, Russian doll, Scotland, sequential Monte Carlo, Sid Chib, Skye, speedup, spike-and-slab prior, variable dimension models on April 21, 2014 by xi'an
As I was flying over Skye (with [maybe] a first if hazy perspective on the Cuillin ridge!) to Iceland, three long sets of replies to some of my posts appeared on the ‘Og:
- Dan Simpson replied to my comments of last Tuesday about his PC construction;
- Arnaud Doucet precised some issues about his adaptive subsampling paper;
- Amandine Schreck clarified why I had missed some points in her Bayesian variable selection paper;
- Randal Douc defended the efficiency of using Carlin and Chib (1995) method for mixture simulation.
Thanks to them for taking the time to answer my musings…
