Archive for jISBA

« Older Entries

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).

Leave a comment »

Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award 2025 [call]

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 3, 2025 by xi'an

[Reposted:] The Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award by j-ISBA ia 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 (JB³) 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. The deadline is 15 July 2025.

Leave a comment »

JSM 2024, Portland, Day 3

Posted in pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2024 by xi'an

Bayesian contributed session as the first round of the third day (with a choice of five parallel sessions featuring Bayesian topics!!, actually easier to pick than among the following eight parallel sessions of the 10:30 schedule!!!), with a talk by Tahir Ekin on adversarial outlier detection that could connect with our Oceaner(c) privacy concerns. Then one involving spike & slab (a theme to figure prominently in this special day!!) in mixed response models by Sameer Deshpande, seeking a (unBayesian!) MAP for a latent variable model by Monte Carlo EM. Followed by a talk by Yunyi Shen on completely random measures for estimating the (distribution of the) number of species in heterogeneous populations. Next, Valentin Zulj on (frequentist rather than) Bayesian stacking, on estimating optimal weights for model averaging (which should be posterior probabilities in a pure Bayesian mindframe), including a score function that could lead to generalised Bayesian inference on said weights. Finishing with a talk by Chaegeun Song on correcting Bayesian credible sets towards (frequentist, again!!!) exact coverage for classification (which reminded me of my very first paper with George on correcting frequentist confidence for Binomial observations). With which I could not really engage as seeking a specific coverage level did not seem relevant, imho, but I appreciated the wheel plot representation.My second morn session was about modern (what else?!) sampling algorithms, although I spent the first dozen minutes wondering whether or not I had entered the wrong room. Until Tianhao Wang focussed on Thompson sampling for bandits. It did prove far enough from my interest for my (sleep deprived) attention to drift too quickly. Only the talk by Yuchen Wu on a spike & slab (as suits the day!) challenge captured enough this wandering attention. Crossing further into my realm of primary topics by considering a target distribution that is a product of distributions. But I did not get from her presentation how a product measure decomposition was inducing higher efficiency (and did not find answers within the arXived preprint). Unless it exploited specific features of the target, like conditional independence between the components. The last talk was by Brice Huang on sampling low temperature Gibbs measures using stochastic localisation.

After coming upon a row of food trucks across the conference centre and being unfairly attracted by an Ethiopian injera picture into a terrible wrap, I returned for the Skeptical about AI session, just a few minutes late, only to find accessing the session was impossible! Quite sad to miss the presentations and the arguments (even though I had heard a previous talk by Genevera Allen when visiting Rutgers two years ago). As a second best, I then joined the recent (of course!) Advances in Bayesian Computation (aka ABC?!) session with a medley of topics, including a data subset versus data sketching model reduction by Sudipto Saha. Which could have consequences on our privacy strategies. And marginal evidence estimation for the Bayesian Lasso by Christopher Hans while avoiding data completion. And another latent variable model with a sequential variational Bayes approach by Bao Anh Vu, using at one point Cappé et al. (2005) EM-based approximation to the log likelihood gradient. Finishing by a back-to-the-future talk by Luke Duttweiler on MCMC convergence diagnostics. Comparing several chains via proximity maps that themselves require some preliminary knowledge about the MCMC kernel. (Nice title though, “the traceplot thickens”!)The crux of the day was however the 2024 COPSS Award ceremony with several friends featuring among the recipients, Danielle Durante for the Emerging Leaders Award, Regina Liu for the Elizabeth L. Scott Award and Veronika Rockova for the Presidents’ Award. Congrats!!!



Leave a comment »

JB³ [Junior Bayes beyond the borders]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 22, 2020 by xi'an

Bocconi and j-ISBA are launcing a webinar series for and by junior Bayesian researchers. The first talk is on 25 June, 25 at 3pm UTC/GMT (5pm CET) with Francois-Xavier Briol, one of the laureates of the 2020 Savage Thesis Prize (and a former graduate of OxWaSP, the Oxford-Warwick doctoral training program), on Stein’s method for Bayesian computation, with as a discussant Nicolas Chopin.

As pointed out on their webpage,

Due to the importance of the above endeavor, JB³ will continue after the health emergency as an annual series. It will include various refinements aimed at increasing the involvement of the whole junior Bayesian community and facilitating a broader participation to the online seminars all over the world via various online solutions.

Thanks to all my friends at Bocconi for running this experiment!

Leave a comment »

BAYSM 2020, Kunming, China [reposted]

Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on January 13, 2020 by xi'an

The 5th Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting, BAYSM2020, will take place in Kunming, China (June 26-27, 2020) as a satellite to the ISBA 2020 world meeting. BAYSM is the official conference of j-ISBA, the junior section of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. It is intended for Ph.D. Students, M.S. Students, Post-Docs, Young and Junior researchers working in the field of Bayesian statistics, providing an opportunity to connect with the Bayesian community at large. Senior discussants will be present at each session, providing participants with hints, suggestions and comments to their work. Distinguished professors of the Bayesian community will also participate as keynote speakers, making an altogether exciting program.

Registration is now open (https://baysm2020.uconn.edu/registration) and will be available with an early bird discount until May 1, 2020. The event will be hosted at the Science Hall of Yunnan University (Kunming, China) right before ISBA 2020 world meeting. BAYSM 2020 will include social events, providing the opportunity to get to know other junior Bayesians.

Young researchers interested in giving a talk or presenting a poster are invited to submit an extended abstract by March 29, 2020. All the instructions for the abstract submission are reported at the page https://baysm2020.uconn.edu/call-dates

Thanks to the generous support of ISBA, a number of travel awards are available to support young researchers.

Keynote speakers:
Maria De Iorio
David Dunson
Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter
Xuanlong Nguyen
Amy Shi
Jessica Utts

Confirmed discussants:
Jingheng Cai
Li Ma
Fernando Quintana
Francesco Stingo
Anmin Tang
Yemao Xia

While the meeting is organized for and by junior Bayesians, attendance is open to anyone who may be interested. For more information, please visit the conference website: https://baysm2020.uconn.edu/

Leave a comment »

« Older Entries