Archive for jatp

ISBA⁴

Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 3, 2026 by xi'an

After a 5am run in emptied and very humid Nagano, to tour the castle grounds, if not the castle itself, with a rather unpleasant urban route, and a recovery matcha scone at the local French (-inspired) bakery, resisting the kouign aman!, I attended the highly diverse Bayesian non-parametric session (with mentions of Lisieux, near my childhood grounds, if in relation with English history, since the bishop of Lisieux appeared in Geoff Nicholls’ graph analysis. And Gregor Katzner’s repulsive mixtures.)

Then skipped Peter Muller’s de Finetti talk [sorry Peter!] with a few friends to get to nearby Atsuta-jingū (Shinto shrine) and the nearby Bunka-den, with a famous hitsumabushi (eel) restaurant that was alas fully booked. But a slightly less fancy one delivered well enough. This was a nice place, with a large park, full of worshippers clapping and touring the shrines. We even X’ed a group of salarymen in their company uniform welcomed by a Shinto priest.

And I was back in time for the junior Bayesian (jISBA) session. With Deborah Sulem talking on statistical fairness, which I could not fully distinguish from the general issue of missing covariates (corresponding to discriminated categories) or from unbalanced sampling. Jack Jewson (also coauthor of the paper with Deborah) argued about using quasi-likelihoods for consistent model selection, presumably most convincingly but jetlag hit during his talk and I had a fit of micro-naps… And Noirrit Chandra discussed a privacy-preserving Bayesian nonparametric approach through clusters and the release of MCMC outputs, close enough to my own research to fight the naps. The day closed with Emtiyaz Khan talking as at BayesComp last year on acceleration techniques as sustainable AI (although I am afraid this does not tackle the unsustainability of AI as a whole).

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).

Cuillins in majesty [jatp]

Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 20, 2026 by xi'an

room with [what] a view [jatp]

Posted in pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on May 7, 2026 by xi'an

a journal of the no-end-war year

Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 6, 2026 by xi'an

Read my first book in Italian!, namely the fumetto Favola di Venezia (Sirat Al-Bunduqiyyah) by Hugo Pratt. Which I bought in the nice bookstore of the Santa Lucia train station rather than in the new store dedicated to Corto Maltese, in the Ghetto. It took me a while, as I had to get through word by word, rather than rushing through the dialogues as in French BDs or US comics. But this was most appropriate for a fairly oniric story that is more an homage to Pratt’s childhood place than a political mystery (even though the growth of fascism is also impacting the story). Going through each block that slowly further made me try to recognise some places (without checking websites that identify each real location!). As a coïncidence, The New York Times published a long review of… Fable of Venice and Other Adventures (other meaning “The Secret of Tristan Bantam,” “So Much for Gentlemen of Fortune,” and “The Seagull’s Fault,”) which goes over Pratt’s childhood, in Venice, his family (a grand-father joining early the fascists, via Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, a father moving the family to Ethiopia in 1937 as an overseer of a fascist labour camp, later dying in an Allied prisoner camp),  his adventures as an errand boy in an Ethiopian brothel, then as a translator for the Allies occupying Venice, and later moving to Buenos Aires to work for a publisher… (Incidentally, I realised during that trip that Milano and Torino only got liberated on 25 Aprile 1945, a few days before the official end of WW II in Europe. Venezia and Padua got liberated on 28 Aprile.)

During my last trip (this semester!) in Venezia, I was (almost) kidnapped for a dinner at la Trattoria alle Vignole, located on the Isola le Vignole, which I had never visited before. (It is located east of Murano, facing the entrance to the Arsenale.) Which proved exceptional in many ways, from the isola(tion), to the absence of any other customers, to the ferry ride, to watching the sunset on Cannaregio and Murano, and of course to the endless flow of sea-food and fish dishes (not mentioning the company!!)… After tasting (or rather devouring!) a colomba pasquale (for Easter), I also brought home several versions of the similar foccacia veneta, for a battle of bakers!

Watched Phantom Lawyer, a rather silly, heavy going, Korean TV series featuring a struggling lawyer who can see ghosts and bring their cases to a satisfactory conclusion. With the usual conflicts of interest, massive coïncidences, and hopelessly slow romantic entanglements.