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.
Archive for ISBA
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'anreporting on the future of ISBA conferences
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel, University life with tags committee work, discussion, inclusiveness, ISBA, ISBA 2026, Japan, mirror workshop, multi-hub conference, Nagoya on June 25, 2026 by xi'an
Following our earlier survey on the topic, we have now returned our report on the future of ISBA conferences to the ISBA Executive Committee and Guido Consonni wrote an extensive summary of the contents of this report for the ISBA Bulleting that just appeared. This is most timely since it comes just days prior to the ISBA World Meeting in Nagoya, Japan, with a discussion session on Thursday, during lunch break, where we will present the conclusions of this report and engage in discussions with the participants. Looking forward to it!
invited sessions for BayesComp 2027
Posted in pictures, Travel, University life with tags Aussois, BayesComp 2027, Bayesian Computing Section, conference, France, invited talk, ISBA, MCMSki, mirror workshop, multihub conferences, Texas, Texas A&M University, USA on June 12, 2026 by xi'an
BayesComp 2027, ISBA computational conference (and successor to the MCMski series) will take place in Texas A&M University, College Station, on 18-20 May 2027. The scientific committee has launched a call for invited session proposals, with deadline 15 Aug 2026. For those unable to get to Texas, a mirror meeting is planned in Aussois, French Alps, on the same week. (Details to follow.)
j-ISBA Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award²⁶ [call reposted]
Posted in Statistics with tags Arianna Rosenbluth, Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award, David Blackwell, Harvard University, ISBA, j-ISBA, Junior Bayes Beyond the Borders, Los Alamos Research Laboratory, MANIAC, Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, Metropolis algorithm, University of California Berkeley on May 15, 2026 by xi'anCall for award nominations
Dear all,
It is with great pleasure that we announce the Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award by j-ISBA, a recently established award for junior researchers in different areas of Bayesian statistics. The award aims at recognizing outstanding junior Bayesian researchers based on their overall contribution to the field and to the community. There will be six winners in total who will be invited to present their work in two special events of the Junior Bayes Beyond the Borders (JB^3) webinar series and receive three years of free ISBA and j-ISBA membership.
ISBA proudly has a wide geographical diversity among its members. To encourage scientific exchange and strengthen research connections between geographies, three prizes will be awarded to researchers based in time zones UTC+0 to UTC+13 [e.g. Africa + Asia + Europe + Oceania] and three to those based in UTC-12 to UTC-1 [e.g. North America + South America]. We welcome nominations of junior researchers working in the broad spectrum of topics in Bayesian statistics, including but not limited to methods, theory, computation, machine learning, data science, biostatistics, econometrics, industrial statistics, environmental science, and software.
There will be two scientific committees: one representing UTC- and the other representing UTC+, each consisting of members from their respective regions based on their professional affiliations. These committees are tasked with evaluating candidates for the award. The UTC- committee will evaluate submissions from UTC+ and vice versa.
Why Blackwell-Rosenbluth
The award is named after David H. Blackwell and Arianna W. Rosenbluth for their groundbreaking works that lie at the foundation of modern Bayesian statistical theory and computation. They represent important role models for new researchers in Bayesian statistics.
David Harold Blackwell
Born on April 24, 1919, Blackwell excelled in mathematics from an early age. He earned his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Joseph L. Doob in 1941. He had a distinguished career, becoming a founding member in 1955 of the newly established Department of Statistics at University California, Berkeley. In 1965, he became the first African American to be elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1979. In addition to his seminal contributions to Bayesian inference, decision theory, game theory, sequential analysis and renewal theory, he also wrote one of the first textbooks in Bayesian statistics (Basic Statistics, McGraw-Hill, 1969).
Arianna Wright Rosenbluth
Born on September 15, 1927, Arianna Wright Rosenbluth showed an affinity for sciences from early childhood. She completed her doctoral work under the supervision of a future Nobel Laureate, John Van Vleck, in 1949, making her the fifth woman to earn a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard. Later, as a coauthor of the seminal 1953 paper introducing the Metropolis algorithm, Rosenbluth almost single-handedly implemented the algorithm on the MANIAC I hardware at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. This made her the first person to ever implement the Markov chain Monte Carlo method when sophisticated programming tools were still years away, and the program had to be written in strings of 1’s and 0’s.
Eligibility and Application Procedure
Ph.D. students or early career researchers who obtained their PhD after January 1, 2021 are eligible for nomination. Candidates who were nominated in previous years may be nominated again if they received their Ph.D. after January 1, 2021. In exceptional cases, applicants who are more than five years past their Ph.D. may still be considered if they experienced a significant career break within five years of earning their degree (such as breaks due to illness, caring for a sick family member, pregnancy-related leave, or parental leave). Candidates may inquire about their eligibility, particularly if they have taken career breaks, by sending an email to jisba.section@gmail.com. A nomination may come from any ISBA member, including the nominee themselves. A nomination is to be submitted electronically and should contain:
- Nominating letter in support of the candidate
- CV of the candidate
- One manuscript or alternate form of exposition (e.g. software documentation) of scientific work most representative of the nominee’s achievements; the submitted work should also be available as publication or in a public repository such as arXiv, bioRxiv, CRAN, Bioconductor or GitHub.
Timeline
Nominations for the 2026 award edition are now open! Deadline to submit is July 12, 2026
Keikoku: early registration for ISBA ends up on 7 May
Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Bayes World meeting, ISBA, Japan, Kyushu, logo, Nagoya, registration fees, Shachihoko on May 2, 2026 by xi'an
