Today, I am off to Chennai (aka Madras) for a… Banff workshop! As one of its several branches and associated institutions (incl. Oaxaca), BIRS has the Chennai Mathematical Institute hosting the workshop “Game-theoretic statistical inference: Optional Sampling, Universal Inference, and Multiple Testing based on e-values”, which I attend in an attempt to better ascertain e-values. (Obviously, George Pérec could not have been invited!)
Next week, our lab (CEREMADE) is celebrating the 80th birthday of our friend and colleague Ivar Ekeland with two days of talks and chats. (Registration is free.) Ivar is a leading figure in nonlinear functional analysis, calculus of variations, and mathematical economics. But also a moral beacon for many of us! He was the chairman of CEREMADE, the president of Paris Dauphine, a research chair at UBC, and the head of the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences (managing Banff International Research Station). He wrote (and will write further) highly popular books on mathematics and is heading the sustainable development training at Dauphine.
Just heard that a new “branch” of BIRS was going to open in Granada, Spain! This is most exciting, given the (relative) proximity of Granada when compared with Banff and Oaxaca. And given the most enjoyable city, which I visited several times, esp. when George Casella was there for a year. And given the nearby mountain of Mulhacén.
The full IMAG opportunities will be made available through the BIRS call for proposals that will be issued in June 2022 for the 2024 program. However, we are currently planning a BIRS-IMAG pilot program to be hosted in Granada as early as 2023, and the BIRS Scientific Board will consider a limited number of workshops proposals for the 2023 cycle. Please write to the BIRS Scientific Director (birs-director@birs.ca) for further information, if you are interested in developing such a workshop.
I was much saddened to hear yesterday that our friend and fellow Bayesian Hélène Massam passed away on August 22, 2020, following a cerebrovascular accident. She was professor of Statistics at York University, in Toronto, and, as her field of excellence covered [the geometry of] exponential families, Wishart distributions and graphical models, we met many times at both Bayesian and non-Bayesian conferences (the first time may have been an IMS in Banff, years before BIRS was created). And always had enjoyable conversations on these occasions (in French since she was born in Marseille and only moved to Canada for her graduate studies in optimisation). Beyond her fundamental contributions to exponential families, especially Wishart distributions under different constraints [including the still opened 2007 Letac-Massam conjecture], and graphical models, where she produced conjugate priors for DAGs of all sorts, she served the community in many respects, including in the initial editorial board of Bayesian Analysis. I can also personally testify of her dedication as a referee as she helped with many papers along the years. She was also a wonderful person, with a great sense of humor and a love for hiking and mountains. Her demise is a true loss for the entire community and I can only wish her to keep hiking on new planes and cones in a different dimension. [Last month, Christian Genest (McGill University) and Xin Gao (York University) wrote a moving obituary including a complete biography of Hélène for the Statistical Society of Canada.]
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