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Bayesian job in Cambridge

Posted in R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , on April 26, 2011 by xi'an

Here is an email that could appeal to some readers:

Job in Cambridge MRC-BSU – Bayesian statistician
Career development fellow
MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge

We are offering an exciting opportunity to work on Bayesian models for infectious disease dynamics. A statistician is required to contribute to a programme of research to develop inferential approaches to estimation and prediction of epidemic evolution when relevant information, possibly from diverse sources, arrives at regular intervals, and, likely, in real time. Examples include the monitoring and prediction of long standing epidemics such as HIV, as well as new emerging epidemics (e.g. Swine Flu). Challenges include the need to synthesise heterogeneous and biased information to produce timely updates of epidemic evolution. You will have a PhD in statistics, or a relevant discipline; computing experience, both of statistical packages (e.g. R) and programming languages (e.g. C, C++); and experience of Bayesian statistics. Experience of Bayesian computation (e.g. MCMC) and of Bayesian inference for disease transmission would be advantageous. You must have good communication skills and be able to contribute substantially to writing scientific papers. Starting salary will be in the range of £26,022 – £28,764 per annum.

Applications are handled by the RCUK Shared Services Centre; to apply please visit our job board to view the full job description and person requirements and complete an online application quoting reference IRC18709. If you are unable to apply online please contact us on 01793 867003.

Closing date: 11th May 2011 Interview date: 25th May 2011

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The Devil’s Disciples

Posted in Books with tags , , , , , on May 8, 2010 by xi'an

`Magic?’ echoed Bartholomew warily. `Do you really believe in this sort of things?’

I have finished my fourteenth chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew, The Devil’s Disciples, and this one seems to be the most disappointing of all! Maybe it is getting harder and harder for the author, Susanna Gregory, to find good plots and to sustain a realistic and exciting pace for her novels within the same environment of 14th Century Cambridge and with the same characters from the fictional college Michaelhouse. This novel mostly suffers from a poor plot, as most of the action is unbelievable and anachronistic, while the final resolution is anticlimactic and disappointing. I have found that the recent chronicles have become less credible from a historical viewpoint and some of the exchanges in The Devil’s Disciples are anachronistic. From a global perspective, the book deals (once again) with witchcraft and the fight between Church and the followers of Satanic rites. While I accept the core idea that the Black Death of 1347 has had a strong psychological impact on the beliefs of the survivors and that this could have driven people away from the Church into anti-Christian sects, the openness of their move is not plausible. At that time, witchery was both an heresy and a major crime (because people also believed in charms and curses), the Church inquisition had already been instituted by the Pope, and thus the idea of someone declaring his or her support of a sorcerer/witch or openly attending a sorcery meeting does not make sense to me. The relativity of beliefs expressed in the quote below does not belong to the 14th Century! (The same comment applies to the handling of a book of curses by half the characters in the novel.)

`It is a battle between two belief systems, each with its own merits and failings. The Sorcerer will not see himself as wicked but as one who offers a viable alternative to the Church.’

At the individual level, I find the main characters fairly shallow, Bartholomew spending most of the book running from one point of Cambridge to another one and not doing much else for being so exhausted by the Marathonian training! The changes in a well-established character like Father William are difficult to believe and the final uncovering of the two main culprits is both predictable and implausible to the extreme! Both Brother Michael and Matthew Bartholomew are missing the obvious clues and it takes the providential return of Clippesby to uncover the Sorcerer’s plot (whose point remains obscure to me).So both parts that constitute the appeal of a historical whodunnit are mostly lost in The Devil’s Disciples. I hope the next chronicle, A Vein of Deceit, succeeds better! (Even though early reviews are not promising…)

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Rare events in Cambridge

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , on February 9, 2010 by xi'an

This morning, I got a mass email about an interesting workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge about rare event simulation:

RESIM 2010 is the 8th workshop in a series of successful events held on the same topic in Aachen (Germany) 1997, Enschede (The Netherlands) 1999, Pisa (Italy) 2000, Madrid (Spain) 2002, Budapest (Hungary) 2004, Bamberg (Germany) 2006, and Rennes (France) 2008.

It covers all aspects of rare event simulation ranging from purely theoretical developments to practical applications. The objective is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners working in different locations and on different applications to present recent results, exchange ideas, and discuss open problems and new direction. While contributed talks are encouraged, one need not present a paper in order to participate in this event.

The 2010 meeting is being organized as part of a broader simulation workshop sponsored by the Newton Institute at Cambridge University. The RESIM event will dominate the first two days of the workshop (Monday, June 21 and Tuesday, June 22), while the third day (Wednesday, June 23) will consider simulation topics lying outside the rare-event domain. RESIM 2010 participants will be automatically registered in this broader three day event.

If you have an interest in presenting a paper at RESIM 2010, please note that the conference has a particular interest in soliciting papers that present advances, new results and applications in the field of rare-event simulation (especially those that make a contribution to some area of network models and/or the communication sciences, given the overall theme of the Newton Institute programme of which this is a part). The scope of the workshop includes (but is not limited to):

* Importance sampling based simulation techniques
* Rare event simulation techniques based on splitting sample paths (e.g., the RESTART method)
* Other novel approaches to rare event simulation
* Rare event simulation of heavy-tailed and long range dependent processes
* Large deviations theory

The Program Committee for RESIM 2010 consists of: Søren Asmussen (Aarhus U, Denmark), José Blanchet (Columbia U, USA), Sergey Foss (Herriott-Watt U, UK), Peter Glynn (Stanford U, USA), Victor Nicola (Twente U, Netherlands), and Bruno Tuffin (INRIA, France). The expectation is that at least one co-author of each accepted paper will participate in the RESIM conference.

I wish I could go but with three other meetings planned for June, this is getting a bit too tight!

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