Archive for Festschrift

Éric turns 60

Posted in Books, Mountains, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2023 by xi'an

Conférence en l’honneur d’Eric Moulines

13-14 sept. 2023 IHP Paris (France)

There will be a conference / Festschrift held for the 60th birthday of Eric Moulines [longtime friend, coauthor, ERC Synergy co-PI, whom I almost killed when missing a catch on Dent Parrachée!] at Institut Henri Poincaré, Paris, on 13 and 14 September 2023. Registration is free, but compulsory.

These two days will celebrate the variety of the research topics covered by Eric Moulines over thirty years and the broad and thorough impact he had on many different scientific communities. In particular, through more than 100 papers published in highly selective journals, he has made essential contributions in as many fields as statistical signal processing, time series analysis, inference in partially observed models, non-linear filtering, computational statistics, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, stochastic optimization methods, as well as hot topics related to artificial intelligence like generative models, variational inference or Bayesian machine learning.

Festschift for Sylvia

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2023 by xi'an

At Sylvia Richardson’s career celebration last Friday, I gave a talk on How many components in a mixture? which was most relevant given Sylvia’s contributions to mixture inference over the years, including her highly influential 1997 Read Paper with Peter Green. The other talks highlighted the many facets of Sylvia to the field and the profession, including obviously her MRC Unit directorship but also her RSS Presidency when she drove along with Chris Holmes the remarkable society’s response to the COVID pandemic. The day ended up with a diner in Emmanuel College (in the Dining Hall rather than the larger, noisier, and more formal Hall where I was once invited for the Midsummer Dinner by Sylvia). It was also a great opportunity to reconnect with friends I had not seen for ages.

Festschrift for William E. Strawderman

Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , on March 19, 2012 by xi'an

Éric Marchand just sent me the news that the Festschrift volume he edited jointly with Dominique Fourdrinier and Andrew Rukhin in honour of our dear friend Bill Strawderman has now appeared on ProjectEuclid. It is freely accessible, thanks to this great IMS policy of making everything available on-line. As my research focus drifted away from shrinkage estimation and decision theory, I am sorry I could not contribute to the volume… (I “met” Bill through my readings during my PhD thesis and “in the flesh” when visiting Cornell two years later. He has produced some of the most elegant results in the area of Stein estimation, incl. the one that no proper Bayes estimator can be minimax in dimension four or less, and if a particular shrinkage estimator was to be “Hall-of-Fame-d”, it would be his! Bill visited us in Rouen (Dominique and I) many times and even learned French in order to teach there. I also happened to have the most hilarious moment of my life [so far!] with him and George Casella on an Ithaca country road, late on a summer night, but I cannot alas disclose the details!!!)