Archive for Chamonix-Mont-Blanc
the sky [isn’t] the limit
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Alpine meadows, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, clouds, French Alps, glacier, Les Bossons, Les Houches, Mont Blanc, snow, winter running on March 21, 2024 by xi'an
UTMB congratulations!
Posted in Kids, Mountains, Running with tags Chamonix, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, Courmayer, French Alps, Italian Alps, Martinique, Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, Swiss Alps, Ultratrail du Mont Blanc, UTMB on September 4, 2023 by xi'an
Congrats to all runners of the UTMB 2023 this weekend, but most particularly to Alexis Baron a friend and colleague of our daughter in Martinique, who finished 164th in less than 30 hours the 172.2km length and 9967m elevation race.
one more time around the block [UTMB 22]
Posted in Mountains, Running, Travel with tags altitude running, Chamonix, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, Courmayer, French Alps, Italian Alps, Mont Blanc, Pays du Mont-Blanc, Swiss Alps, trail running, Ultratrail du Mont Blanc, UTMB on August 22, 2022 by xi'an
day four at ISBA 22
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags BayesComp 2023, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, conference practicals, Finland, fire, generalised Bayesian inference, Gibbs posterior, hidden Markov models, ISBA 2022, Japanese cuisine, Jim Berger, Leci, machine learning, MCMSki IV, mirror workshop, misspecification, Mont Royal, Montréal, Plateau-Mont Royal, Pu Erh tea, Saint-Laurent, Savage award, SAVI, Sherbrooke, stick breaking process, University of Warwick, variational Bayes methods, visa on July 3, 2022 by xi'an
Woke up an hour later today! Which left me time to work on [shortening] my slides for tomorrow, run to Mon(t) Royal, and bike to St-Viateur Bagels for freshly baked bagels. (Which seemed to be missing salt, despite my low tolerance for salt in general.)
Terrific plenary lecture by Pierre Jacob in his Susie Bayarri’s Lecture about cut models! Offering a very complete picture of the reasons for seeking modularisation, the theoretical and practical difficulties with the approach, and some asymptotics as well. Followed a great discussion by Judith on cut posteriors separating interest parameters from nuisance parameters, especially in semi-parametric models. Even introducing two priors on the same parameters! And by Jim Berger, who coauthored with Susie the major cut paper inspiring this work, and illustrated the concept on computer experiments (not falling into the fallacy pointed out by Martin Plummer at MCMski(v) in Chamonix!).
Speaking of which, the Scientific Committee for the incoming BayesComp²³ in Levi, Finland, had a working meeting to which I participated towards building the programme as it is getting near. For those interested in building a session, they should make preparations and take advantage of being together in Mon(t)réal, as the call is coming out pretty soon!
Attended a session on divide-and-conquer methods for dependent data, with Sanvesh Srivastava considering the case of hidden Markov models and block processing the observed sequence. Which is sort of justified by the forgettability of long-past observations. I wonder if better performances could be achieved otherwise as the data on a given time interval gives essentially information on the hidden chain at other time periods.
I was informed this morn that Jackie Wong, one speaker in our session tomorrow could not make it to Mon(t)réal for visa reasons. Which is unfortunate for him, the audience and everyone involved in the organisation. This reinforces my call for all-time hybrid conferences that avoid penalising (or even discriminating) against participants who cannot physically attend for ethical, political (visa), travel, health, financial, parental, or any other, reasons… I am often opposed the drawbacks of lower attendance, risk of a deficit, dilution of the community, but there are answers to those, existing or to be invented, and the huge audience at ISBA demonstrates a need for “real” meetings that could be made more inclusive by mirror (low-key low-cost) meetings.
Finished the day at Isle de Garde with a Pu Ehr flavoured beer, in a particularly lively (if not jazzy) part of the city…
milky stout from Chamonix-Mont-Blanc
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags Abbaye de Tamié, Brasserie du Mont Blanc, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, French Alps, French beer, milk stout, stout, whey on August 20, 2020 by xi'an
