Archive for ISBA 2024

Mappamondo di Fra Mauro [jatp]

Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 19, 2024 by xi'an

When (re)visiting the Doges’ Palace in Venice yesterday, and its window into the working of the Venetian Republic, we came upon a temporary exhibition on the journey of Marco Polo, which was great (and little attended). It included a reproduction of Fra Mauro’s map, made in 1452 in Venice, for the Government of the Republic and built on many sources including Marco Polo’s memoirs, Le Devisement du monde written in 1298 in franco-italian. (The original sits next door in Museo Correr.) The level of detail is mesmerizing and we spent quite a while seeking known places (with the Italian spelling at the time). It covers a lot of places from South-East Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Sri Lanka, as well as Madagascar. The exhibition as a whole is certainly worth the (few euros and the) trip from Ca’ Foscari if attending ISBA 2024.

per una democrazia che no fermi al momento del voto [jatp]

Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 18, 2024 by xi'an

international celebration of blasphemy [jatp]

Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , on July 12, 2024 by xi'an

a bridge too far! [19:31, 3rd, 26⁰, 6am]

Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2024 by xi'an

venISBA⁴⁻

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 8, 2024 by xi'an

As I was released all of a sudden from the Ospedale Civile di Venezia around noon, I managed to attend the last session of ISBA 2024 (after stopping by my airbnb for an emergency coffee next to the hospital and stopping for showering, changing clothes, and eating something more substantial than the contents of IV bags).

My first of these last talks was about coresets by Trevor Campbell, for reducing sample sizes while keeping the likelihood roughly the same (and making me wondering if possibly getting some privacy on the side??) Original algorithm almost completely blind to the data, but a new version by subsample-optimize (KL distance to the posterior) version bringing huge improvements (although I missed the practical details on how the algorithm is reaching this minimum), namely a KL distance of order O(1), i.e., not growing in the sample size. Then, in the same session, a talk by Aikihiko Nakamura on mixing and PDMP, resulting in the novel bouncy Hamiltonian dynamics, which proves time reversible and volume preserving, with no U turns and the time within a given general Hamiltonian value being itself generated w/o rejection. (I am quite sorry to have missed other PDMP talks during the conference, eg, Paul Fearnhead’s, as well as the last poster session…) And I finally jumped rooms to listen to Sam Power on hybrid slice sampling with an MCMC extension to avoid simulating from the Uniform conditional. Reminding me of nested sampling, which also faces this difficulty of sampling from a possibly complex set. This was the end of a wonderful (if shortened by my personal issue) meeting. Next round, see you in Nagoya, Japan (on the Tōkaidō road!).


As a final word about this ISBA 2024 conference in Ca’Foscari, on many levels, I want to most warmly thank my friend Roberto Casarin for his investment and dedication for making the event running so efficiently, in an ideal environment for a meeting of this (800+) size that kept to the Aristotelian unities, especially keeping people together on a unique site without feeling crowded (and very few falling in a Venice canal). And many thanks as well to the local organisers (discounting my nominal inclusion in that group!), the Ca’Foscari staff, and all the students involved in the event!