Archive for ISBA 2026
A hundred mirrors shine together, a hundred hubs resonate together!
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags calligraphy, ChatGPT, Chinese Communist Party, committee on the future of ISBA conferences, dictature, ISBA, ISBA 2026, Mao Zedong, Maoist posters, mirror workshop, multi-hub conference, Nagoya, survey, The Hundred Flowers Campaign, traditional Chinese calligraphy on July 2, 2026 by xi'an
ISBA³
Posted in pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags adversarial privacy, approximate Bayesian inference, Aussois, BayesComp 2027, Bayesian predictive, differential privacy, ERC, European Research Council, grilled eel, hitsumabushi, ISBA 2026, Isle of Skye, mirror workshop, Ocean, Oceanerc, persuasive privacy, privacy, PSL Research University, Savage award, Skye, student visa, Université Paris Dauphine, Warwick Statistics, working visa on July 2, 2026 by xi'an
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…
ISBA 2026²
Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Bayesian model averaging, Bayesian model choice, Bernstein-von Mises theorem, Chib's approximation, evidence, ISBA 2026, ISBA World Meeting, Japan, map, model uncertainty, Nagoya, Rashomon, Sid Chib, Wasserstein distance on July 1, 2026 by xi'an
One morning session on optimal transport after first-hand witnessing the impressive ballet of orderly lines entering the subway at Nagoya Station (and a very early run along the river and a high humidity rate, hence the picture of empty street at 5am). With Hugo Lavenant exhibiting optimal rates for Bayesian nonparametrics using Wasserstein distances, Pierre Jacob coupling MCMC chains, and Anya Katsevich investigating non-Gaussian asymptotic distributions in high dimensions (beyond Bernstein-von Mises). Then I tried to attend the session on Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification and Posterior Sampling for Large-Scale Generative Models, but it proved too popular for the number of seats, and I ended up discussing with others. After a nap related to my jetlag induced, early, rise I went back to chair Sid Chib’s Foundation Lecture, where he discussed the use of an orbit of models in Bayesian model choice, rather than the (MAP) most likely one. Based on their 2018 JASA paper which I already discussed in Paris with Anna Simoni presenting. Hence reminding me of points I presumably already made, from the issue of having too many models to realistically explore to constructing coherent priors across them, with the fractional, empirical, proxy of using a (same) fraction of the sample as a learning sample, to more philosophical issues like missing a utility function about having to chose a model, especially with all models being wrong, missing an uncertainty quantification on the evidence itself, rather than using most likely models (MAP!), called an orbit by Sid (which requires some calibration). Since the uncertainty represented by the sample induces an uncertainty in the ranking of models. And a most appropriate, almost local, occurrence of the Rashomon principle!!! And I finished the day mixing with many friends in the poster session¹, where Darren Wraith presented our ongoing work on novel, adaptive, importance, sampling.
ISBA 2026¹
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags admissibility, Bayesian predictive, clustering, conference, deadline, foundation lectures, ISBA, ISBA 2026, Japan, Jeffreys-Lindley paradox, Kyoto, Kyushu, logo, mixtures of distributions, Nagoya, registration fees, Shachihoko, Stein effect, student membership, Tokyo, WINC AICHI on June 30, 2026 by xi'an
An ISBA World meeting is always an exciting event that verges on the sensory overload! The more when one’s flight is perversely designed to land at my usual bedtime. (I tried waking up very early and running for an hour before catching the plane but this did not make me doze for more than one hour or two in the plane.) To explain why I missed the first two foundation lectures of the day, including the one by my dear friend Sylvia Richardson, as I was still resting (to avoid repeating my fainting upon arrival as happened last year, or later as). Incidentally, these lectures made me realise I had given one in Kyoto (on ABC) in 2012. I however managed to attend David Dunson’s wide recap on Bayesian clustering(s), with slides ChatGPT confused with posters, hence a massive information content had I been able to read them from my seat! More fundamentally, the residual difficulty being the very notion of cluster itself. And a jump back in time with Fumiyasu Komaki going over his corpus of works on the decision theoretic properties of Bayesian predictives when the Kullback-Leibler divergence is the loss function. An interesting feature of his findings is that comparing priors in that sense is equivalent to comparing them for point estimation in Normal and Poisson cases, but not in the Gamma case, for no reason I can fathom. A philosophical point of contention of mine’s was the introduction of two Jeffreys priors when observed data and predicted data are from different distributions (calibrated by the same parameter θ) since it calls for a Lindley’s style criticism that a realisation not (yet) observed modifies the prior distribution on θ. If possibly leading to improved estimation.
off to Nagoya [ISBA 2026]
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags #ERCSyG, Aichi Prefecture, Bayesian Adversarial Privacy, Bayesian conference, Bayesian inference, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, ISBA 2026, Japan, mirror workshop, multi-hub conference, Nagoya, Ocean, privacy, satellite workshop, Tokyo, vacations, zaibatsu on June 27, 2026 by xi'an
