After another absurdly early run along the Sendai River, in higher humidity than yesterday, I had plenty of time to have breakfast and commute to the conference centre for our privacy section. (“Ours” since I organised and chaired the session, but also all speakers were related with our ERC OCEAN project.) With talks by Antoine Luciano (Dauphine), Shenggang Hu (Warwick) and Joshua Bon (formerly Dauphine), Shenggang presenting his work with Gareth on calibrating a DP, noisy, unbiased, version of Metropolis-Hastings. Given the other sessions highly competing with ours, this 100% OCEAN session was well-attended! My second morning session was the theory & method part of the Savage Award, with unfortunately two of the speakers stuck in the US for visa issues and presenting remotely. There have been years where this session suffered from competition from parallel sessions, but this time showed a quite decent attendance.
As most members of the scientific committee of the BayesComp mirror in Aussois were present, we went out for lunch at a nearby hitsumabushi restaurant to plan registrations and local sessions. Which proved very productive despite enjoying the fantastic eel dishes! If making me miss the beginning of the afternoon session… and then the whole session as the room on predictive Bayes was packed (and some speakers had already delivered on the Isle of Skye). I managed to get to Bottond Szabo’s Foundation lecture, with again common threads with Skye, and then returned to my rental as I was quickly crashing…
In four recent opinion articles, Nature questions the response of the European Research Council (ERC) to a steep increase in grant applications supported by AI tools, namely 
Last week, the ERC announced the 
