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 Kyushu
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'anKeikoku: 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
ISBA 2026, 28 June: registration now open!
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags conference, deadline, ISBA, ISBA 2026, Japan, Kyushu, logo, Nagoya, registration fees, Shachihoko, student membership, WINC AICHI on January 26, 2026 by xi'an
ISBA 2026 (Nagoya, Japan, 28 June – 03 July)
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Bayesian privacy, call for contributions, ISBA, Japan, Kyushu, logo, Nagoya, Oceanerc, privacy, Shachihoko, Shinkansen on October 30, 2025 by xi'an
fresh teas! [for teaholics]
Posted in Statistics with tags Hokkaido, Japan, Japanese tea, Jeju Island, Korea, Kyushu, soba noodles, soba tea, Taiwan, teaholic on September 23, 2022 by xi'an
Here are some new teas I sampled this summer, when visiting a few tea shops here (Paris) and there (Montréal):
- Yakushima black tea, a subtle Japanese tea from a producer of sencha on this far-south subtropical island off Kyushu
- Dong Ding oolong, named after the mountain in Taiwan where these tea bushes grow, also most subtle
- Jejudo green tea, from Jeju island, Korea
- Wakocha Zarai tea, again from Kuyshu, wakocha meaning black tea in Japanese, although the colour is almost red, surprisingly sweet
- Dattan sobacha, a grilled buckwheat (soba!) tea from Hokkaido, with the added perk of eating the buckwheat afterwards!
- Sannenbancha, a dark light Japanese tea roasted over cedar wood, tasting (obviously) woody and vaguely licorice, sannen meaning three years in Japanese, as the bush is left to grow for three years before leave and [mostly] stems are collected. (Actually the full name of this tea is kuki sannen bancha, with kuki meaning twig).
