Archive for habilitation
Straßburger Abenrot
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags ABC, Alsace, bitcoin, blockchain, city walk, day trip, German, habilitation, high speed train, homonym, Ill River, jatp, jury, Jussieu, Petite France, Saint Paul's church, Strasbourg, sunset on April 27, 2026 by xi'an
to the early Universe and back
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, Bayesian inference, BOLFI, CMB, cosmology, cosmoPMC, cosmostats, dark matter, Guy Gavriel Kay, habilitation, IAP, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, J.R. Tolkien, likelihood-free, likelihood-free inference, model misspecification, Observatoire de Paris, Pierre Simon Laplace, SELFI, Simbelmynë on November 16, 2025 by xi'an
On 28 October, I spent the day at Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (where I used to work on PMC for cosmology between 2005 and 2009), as a committee member for the habilitation defence of Florent Leclercq. Not only it was nice to be back in this unique institution (with vestiges from Laplace’s era), but this was a fantastic habilitation, with a superb thesis that beautifully gathered the different fields mastered by the candidate in a highly coherent discourse. And could serve as an introduction to cosmostatistics for many.
And provided the background to ten years (post-PhD) of research on forward modelling in cosmology and resulting Bayesian statistical analysis either by implicit likelihood (or likelihood-free) inference or by field-level inference. He describes the Simbelmynë software he developed to produce maps of the density field and analyse dark matter dynamics. Ẁhose name is borrowed from Tolkien (along with a quote from Guy Gavriel Kay!):
“How fair are the bright eyes in the grass! Evermind they are called, simbelmynë in this land of Men, for they blossom in all the seasons of the year, and grow where dead men rest.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Ring
And the Bayesian computational and modelling tools he elaborated, like SELFI (Simulator expansion for likelihood-free inference, Leclercq et al., 2019), that relates to Michael Gutmann’s and Juka Corander’s BOLFI. (Obviously, I did not get every aspect right from just reading the thesis and attending the lecture, in particular the remarks on using SELFI to assess model misspecification. But I remain impressed by the scope of the work and its likely impact on the field!)
far south
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Biometrika, Computo, ENS Paris-Saclay, habilitation, HDR, MCMC convergence, overdamped Langevin algorithm, PDMP, Saclay, stochastic gradient descent, stochastic optimisation, unadjusted Langevin algorithm, Université Paris-Saclay on February 23, 2022 by xi'an
day of the theses
Posted in Statistics, University life with tags defense, habilitation, PhD thesis, Supéléc, Université Paris Dauphine on May 14, 2012 by xi'an
Today, I will spend my day in thesis defenses, as I take part in a defense committee this morning at Supéléc, about a thesis written by Alireza Roodaki on a new approach to trans-dimensional MCMC for mixtures of distributions. Rather than a new way to simulate from posterior distributions with a varying number of components, the thesis concentrates on the post-simulation processing of the outcome of the simulation, constructing an object similar to the point process representation of Matthew Stephens where components have a meaning across varying dimensions. An interesting and novel perspective. The afternoon, I am part of another defense committee for the habilitation of Fadoua Balabdaoui, my colleague in Paris-Dauphine. Fadoua is working in non-parametric statistics, under shape constraints, but has a wide range of interests and publications that fully justify an habilitation degree at this stage of her career. (Habilitation is a degree required in France and Germany to become a Full Professor and to autonomously advise PhD students.)
Seminar/defence on MCMC
Posted in Statistics, University life with tags habilitation, MCMC, Monte Carlo methods, seminar, Université Paris Descartes on February 18, 2010 by xi'an
Tomorrow, Gersende Fort will defend her Habilitation à diriger des recherches in Paris-Dauphine. (This degree is like a super-PhD, required to become a professor and to supervise PhD students.) The title of Gersende’s talk and habilitation is Monte Carlo methods and Markov chains for simulation and it is open to the public, so, if you are in Paris, you can take this as a good opportunity for a seminar on Gersende’s work with Monte Carlo and MCMC themes in the past years. The talk takes place in Room D520, at Paris-Dauphine at 10am.
