Archive for Highlands

approximately Bayes [on Skye]

Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 28, 2026 by xi'an

Wow, what an exciting workshop in an equally exciting place! Strong themes were post-Bayes (Gibbs priors, martingale priors, predictive Bayes, &tc.) and deep neural network modelling. With animated discussions allowed by the free windows planned in the program. And the very early dinner at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig that let a long sunlit evening for impromptu Q&A’s [with a serving of lamb and another of haggis pie!]. Making me realise the large corpus of work I had missed in the past years on these topics, even though the satellite of BayesComp last year was already an eye opener. (Stay tuned for news about BayesComp 2027 & its mirror in Aussois!) The proposal in Jeff Miller’s discussion of Jeremias Knoblauch’s overview of post-Bayes [I’d rather favour another name!]  to consider directly likelihood values as the data was particularly appealing to me, while reminding me of the foundations of nested sampling. (Hopefully, a new perspective on uncertainty assessment for nested sampling is soon to be completed!)

On the non-academic side, the long days in The North helped with my running with above 90km bagged in the week (and no downpour on the runs). But little to my swimming since the water was cold enough to limit my laps to 5mn each time! Paradoxically the worst day was the one I chose for climbing the Inaccessible Pinnacle (as expanded in another ‘Og entry).

Salomon Skyline Scotland day!

Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2025 by xi'an

post-Bayes workshop at UCL [15 & 16 May 2025]

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 4, 2025 by xi'an

University College London (UCL) is organising a workshop on post-Bayes inference  and asked to post the announcement (despite my feeling that we have not entered the post-Bayes era!). So here it is:

Over the course of two days, they will host eight invited talks from leaders across the post-Bayesian landscape, spanning from PAC Bayes and generalised Bayes to predictive resampling and martingale posteriors. Alongside these, they will host six contributed talks, and a poster session to ignite discussion and innovation in our growing community. The workshop will complement the post-Bayesian seminar series.

Registration is now open, and they are actively accepting talk and poster submissions! (Deadline for submissions: April 11th, 2025.) Travel support for early career researchers will be available and announced closer to the date. See the website for more information. The workshop will take place in Bentham House, UCL, London.

[As a personal aside, we just learned that our proposal for an approximate(ly) Bayes workshop supported by ICMS (Edinburgh) and set on the magical Isle of Skye had been accepted! To be held in Spring 2026!]

International Mountain Day [celebrate & protect!]

Posted in Mountains, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , on December 11, 2024 by xi'an

The Quaker [book review]

Posted in Books, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 6, 2021 by xi'an

I ordered The Quaker, a book by Liam McIlvanney mostly because Liam is the son of WIlliam McIlvanney, whose Glasgow’s Laidlaw trilogy I found stunning. I was intrigued by the attempt at following in his father’s Tartan Noir steps. To make the link stronger this book won the 2018 (William) McIlvanney Prize for crime book! While there are many similarities between the stories, if only because they both take place in Glasgow in the 1960’s, where slums were gradually demolished to become high rises (themselves demolished much later in one of Ian Rankin’s stories, if in Edinburgh), where the police was partly corrupted by local gangsters, and where (im- and e-) migration was spinning the demographics of the city, the styles are different and The Quaker does not read as a clever pastiche. It is definitely a unique and brilliant book, from the vivid depiction of the Glasgow of these times (possibly helped by the fact that many locations were familiar to me from my several visits at the University of Glasgow), to the pretty convincing plot, to the psychological depths of many (male) characters. The women in the story are indeed mostly victims of the serial killer or witnesses, possibly towards reflecting the state of gender inequality in the 1960’s (as far as I remember there were more women at the fore in WIlliam’s books), with the inclusion of a victim of the Magdalene asylums. The outlying nature of the main detective is another feature common to father and son: while McCormack does not carry philosophy books to work, he remains apart from the other detectives, including a secret that threatens both the case and his career.