Archive for AISTATS 2016

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conference deadlines [register now!!]

Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on February 11, 2016 by xi'an

bike trail from Kenilworth to the University of WarwickRegistration is now open for our [fabulous!] CRiSM workshop on estimating [normalising] constants, in Warwick, on April 20-22 this year. While it is almost free (almost as in £40.00!), we strongly suggest you register asap if only to secure a bedroom on the campus at a moderate rate of £55.00 per night (breakfast included!). Plus we would like to organise the poster session(s) and the associated “elevator” talks for the poster presenters.

While the deadline for early registration at AISTATS is now truly over, we also encourage all researchers interested in this [great] conference to register as early as possible, if only [again] to secure a room at the conference location, the Parador Hotel in Cádiz. (Otherwise, there are plenty of rentals in the neighbourhood.)

Last and not least, the early registration for ISBA 2016 in Santa Margherita di Pula, Sardinia, is still open till February 29. And the rate will move immediately to late registration fees. The same deadline applies to bedroom reservations in the resort, with apparently only a few rooms left for some of the nights. Rentals and hotels around are also getting filled rather quickly.

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conference deadlines

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 22, 2016 by xi'an

Just to remind participants to AISTATS 2016 and to ISBA 2016 that the deadlines for early registration are January 31 and February 10, getting close. Since both fees are quite high, it certainly makes sense to take advantage of those deadlines (and to make all travel reservations). (While I did try to see the fees of AISTATS 2016 set to a lower value, half of the fees are paying for coffee breaks and the banquet and the welcome party and were not negotiable. As my suggestion of cancelling the banquet was not accepted either! At least, the offer of accommodations in Cadiz is reasonable, from the list of hotels on the website, to a large collection of airbnb listings [minus the one I just reserved!]. And both Spain and Italy set an heavy 20% tax on conferences… Warning: the AISTATS 2016 do not cover the shuttle bus transfer from Sevilla, the major airport in the vicinity.)

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AISTATS 2016 [post-decisions]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on December 27, 2015 by xi'an

Now that the (extended) deadline for AISTATS 2016 decisions is gone, I can gladly report that out of 594 submissions, we accepted 165 papers, including 35 oral presentations. As reported in the previous blog post, I remain amazed at the gruesome efficiency of the processing machinery and at the overwhelmingly intense involvement of the various actors who handled those submissions. And at the help brought by the Toronto Paper Matching System, developed by Laurent Charlin and Richard Zemel. I clearly was not as active and responsive as many of those actors and definitely not [and by far] as my co-program-chair, Arthur Gretton, who deserves all the praise for achieving a final decision by the end of the year. We have already received a few complaints from rejected authors, but this is to be expected with a rejection rate of 73%. (More annoying were the emails asking for our decisions in the very final days…) An amazing and humbling experience for me, truly! See you in Cadiz, hopefully.

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more of the same!

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2015 by xi'an

aboriginal artist, NGV, Melbourne, July 30, 2012Daniel Seita, Haoyu Chen, and John Canny arXived last week a paper entitled “Fast parallel SAME Gibbs sampling on general discrete Bayesian networks“.  The distributions of the observables are defined by full conditional probability tables on the nodes of a graphical model. The distributions on the latent or missing nodes of the network are multinomial, with Dirichlet priors. To derive the MAP in such models, although this goal is not explicitly stated in the paper till the second page, the authors refer to the recent paper by Zhao et al. (2015), discussed on the ‘Og just as recently, which applies our SAME methodology. Since the paper is mostly computational (and submitted to ICLR 2016, which takes place juuust before AISTATS 2016), I do not have much to comment about it. Except to notice that the authors mention our paper as “Technical report, Statistics and Computing, 2002”. I am not sure the editor of Statistics and Computing will appreciate! The proper reference is in Statistics and Computing, 12:77-84, 2002.

“We argue that SAME is beneficial for Gibbs sampling because it helps to reduce excess variance.”

Still, I am a wee bit surprised at both the above statement and at the comparison with a JAGS implementation. Because SAME augments the number of latent vectors as the number of iterations increases, so should be slower by a mere curse of dimension,, slower than a regular Gibbs with a single latent vector. And because I do not get either the connection with JAGS: SAME could be programmed in JAGS, couldn’t it? If the authors means a regular Gibbs sampler with no latent vector augmentation, the comparison makes little sense as one algorithm aims at the MAP (with a modest five replicas), while the other encompasses the complete posterior distribution. But this sounds unlikely when considering that the larger the number m of replicas the better their alternative to JAGS. It would thus be interesting to understand what the authors mean by JAGS in this setup!

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AISTATS 2016 [post-submissions]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on October 22, 2015 by xi'an

Now that the deadline for AISTATS 2016 submissions is past, I can gladly report that we got the amazing number of 559 submissions, which is much more than what was submitted to the previous AISTATS conferences. To the point it made us fear for a little while [but not any longer!] that the conference room was not large enough. And hope that we had to install video connections in the hotel bar!

Which also means handling about the same amount of papers as a year of JRSS B submissions within a single month!, the way those submissions are handled for the AISTATS 2016 conference proceedings. The process is indeed [as in other machine learning conferences] to allocate papers to associate editors [or meta-reviewers or area chairs] with a bunch of papers and then have those AEs allocate papers to reviewers, all this within a few days, as the reviews have to be returned to authors within a month, for November 16 to be precise. This sounds like a daunting task but it proceeded rather smoothly due to a high degree of automation (this is machine-learning, after all!) in processing those papers, thanks to (a) the immediate response to the large majority of AEs and reviewers involved, who bid on the papers that were of most interest to them, and (b) a computer program called the Toronto Paper Matching System, developed by Laurent Charlin and Richard Zemel. Which tremendously helps with managing about everything! Even when accounting for the more formatted entries in such proceedings (with an 8 page limit) and the call to the conference participants for reviewing other papers, I remain amazed at the resulting difference in the time scales for handling papers in the fields of statistics and machine-learning. (There was a short lived attempt to replicate this type of processing for the Annals of Statistics, if I remember well.)

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