Archive for painting
Bataille des Saintes (1782)
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags American Revolutionary War, Îles des Saintes, Bataille des Saintes, Battle of Dominica, Caribbean, Caribbean Sea, Dominica, Fort Napoléon, French-English wars, Guadeloupe, Les Saintes, Musée Fort Napoléon, Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoléon III, naval battle, painting, Ville de Paris on September 1, 2025 by xi'an
Laplace’s Demon [coming home!]
Posted in Kids, Linux, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags 9/11, ABC, Criteo, daemon, His Dark Materials, Laplace's Demon, machine learning, Observatoire de Paris, painting, Pierre Simon Laplace, seminar, Twin Towers, unix, webinar on May 11, 2020 by xi'an
A new online seminar is starting this week, called Laplace’s Demon [after too much immersion in His Dark Materials, lately, ather than Unix coding, I first wrote daemon!] and concerned with Bayesian Machine Learning at Scale. Run by Criteo in Paris (hence the Laplace filiation, I presume!). Here is the motivational blurb from their webpage
Machine learning is changing the world we live in at a break neck pace. From image recognition and generation, to the deployment of recommender systems, it seems to be breaking new ground constantly and influencing almost every aspect of our lives. In this seminar series we ask distinguished speakers to comment on what role Bayesian statistics and Bayesian machine learning have in this rapidly changing landscape. Do we need to optimally process information or borrow strength in the big data era? Are philosophical concepts such as coherence and the likelihood principle relevant when you are running a large scale recommender system? Are variational approximations, MCMC or EP appropriate in a production environment? Can I use the propensity score and call myself a Bayesian? How can I elicit a prior over a massive dataset? Is Bayes a reasonable theory of how to be perfect but a hopeless theory of how to be good? Do we need Bayes when we can just A/B test? What combinations of pragmatism and idealism can be used to deploy Bayesian machine learning in a large scale live system? We ask Bayesian believers, Bayesian pragmatists and Bayesian skeptics to comment on all of these subjects and more.
The seminar takes places on the second Wednesday of the month, at 5pm (GMT+2) starting ill-fatedly with myself on ABC-Gibbs this very Wednesday (13 May 2020), followed by Aki Vehtari, John Ormerod, Nicolas Chopin, François Caron, Pierre Latouche, Victor Elvira, Sara Filippi, and Chris Oates. (I think my very first webinar was a presentation at the Deutsche Bank, New York, I gave from CREST videoconference room from 8pm till midnight after my trip was cancelled when the Twin Towers got destroyed, on 07 September 2001…)
Grand Central Terminal
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags Agent Orange, Cornell University, coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, George Casella, Grand Central Terminal, Ithaca, New York city, painting, picture, The New Yorker, USA on April 22, 2020 by xi'an
Tile Hill [paintings]
Posted in Statistics with tags airbnb, Britain, council estate, Coventry, George Shaw, Joy Division, painting, The Guardian, The Specials, Tile Hill, Turner Prize, University of Warwick on February 24, 2019 by xi'an
Cosmic wallpaper [an interesting fresco]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags Cosmic Wallpaper, Deep Purple, fresco, painting, Ramphal Building, Simon Patterson, University of Warwick on October 20, 2018 by xi'an
As I attended a seminar in the Ramphal Building of the University of Warwick last week, I discovered a stunning fresco in the lobby of this building, which looked like a constellation map, except that the entries sounded related to rock music. Upon further investigation (!), I found that this is a 2002 painting by Simon Patterson, called Cosmic Wallpaper, purchased by the Contemporary Art Society Special Collection Scheme for Warwick, which recuperates the map to draw an history of Deep Purple! Stunning!
