The ICSDS 2024 meeting in Nice is quite impressive and not primarily because it is in Nice under a beautiful December sun. As other (numerous) IMS meetings I attended (since the initial one in Uppsala in 1990!), the program is of high quality and along topics that are currently moving fast or emerging. From the sessions I attended, e-values are strongly represented, although it remains unclear to me why they should constitute a major departure from p-values, as they stick to hypothesis testing, Type I error, power, and the whole paraphernalia of Neyman-Pearson formalism. If I manage to attend a BIRS workshop on the subject next Summer, I may manage to get a better e-derstanding!
The MCMC (only!) session included a presentation by Guanyang Wang that generalised different approximate MCMC schemes into a unified one. And one by Filippo Ascolani on Gibbs beating the competition! I also attended the Bayesian prediction session, where my friends Sonia Petrone and Chris Holmes have presentations on their respective Series B papers. I discussed both on the ‘Og, on 15 March 2023 and 07 November 2022, respectively. This time, I found that both talks had a Bayesian bootstrap flavour, which is not surprising when considering the non-parametric nature of the approach. And they left me wondering at it being protected from overfitting.
My only plenary session was Cynthia Dwork’s on outcome indistinguishability, which, while related to the privacy topics I was topic, remained somewhat obscure as to its purpose. Meaning I have to get through the paper to get a more holistic perspective.
Of course, Nice in Winter is a very nice place, with the waterfront available for running an uninterrupted 15km as we found out with Jérémie Houssineau (at a brisk 4’09” pace I had not planned before starting!) and the sea all for myself (for a dozen minutes before losing digits!). Unfortunately I had to skip the final day due to examinations of the Paris Dauphine MASH master. And miss Stan receiving a student award. But I am looking forward the next iterations of ICSDS. (Not including Copenhagen, Madrid and many many other places in 2025, since ICSDS seemed a most common name for conferences, some presumably predatory! The true location is Sevilla, to keep up with the Mediterranean theme of ICSDS!)
Archive for predatory conferences
Nice meeting!
Posted in pictures, R, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Approximate Bayesian computation, Bayesian bootstrap, Bayesian predictive, BIRS, Côte d'Azur, Chennai, Chennai Mathematical Institute, e-values, French Riviera, Gibbs sampling, hypothesis testing, ICSDS 2024, IMS, indistinguishability, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Neyman-Pearson tests, Nice, open water swimming, p-values, predatory conferences, Promenade des Anglais, reproducible research, Uppsala, w on December 18, 2024 by xi'anNature tidbits [and garbage out]
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, University life with tags adaptive MCMC, Banff National Park, BHP, Census, China, Chinese universities, collaboration, cover, generative AI, India, Indian politics, Ising model, John von Neumann, MANIAC, model collapse, Moraine Lake, Narendra Modi, Nature, overfitting, Pacific North West, phase transition, predatory conferences, preregistered experiments, quantum entanglement, social media, spin glasses on October 25, 2024 by xi'an
- A call by the editors (and computer scientist Cal Newport) for scientists to “stop, drop, and think” (and the paperback version of Newport’s Slow Productivity has a nice cover that looks very much like Moraine Lake in Banff National Parc!)
- Another call by a Science Po’ sociologist to the (then highly prospective) French government to increase research budget for French universities, which is not particularly original since this is a constant line on all unions’ desiderata, except for the argument that it would make a tuition fees increase more palatable, and to leave more freedom to researchers, with the oft-used argument that “fundamental research may have unexpected implications”. Except that a massive public deficit is going to impose budget squeezes in all spending lines of the Barnier government.
- Worries of Indian and non-Indian demographers about the continued postponement of India’s national census, with the latest one dating from 2011. With strong repercussions on public policies, especially since the administrative data systems are rarely reliable. The article suggests that more than an estimated 100 million inhabitants are excluded from food subsidies as a consequence. This seems like an opportunity to develop open source alternatives that run the census from indirect observations, bypassing the reluctance of the Modi Government to launch the much delayed census. (Which could have been coupled with the electoral process earlier this year.)
- An insight on four female “PhD influencers” from the Universities of Pennsylvania, Exeter, Hertfordshire, and Hong Kong (CUHK). Which has a plus side of exposing the life and interests of a PhD student. And a downside of being a social media product, with the many biases that come along posting to the general public.
- A call for publishing more papers about negative results! Supporting (pre)registration of experiments.
- A positive book review of The MANIAC of Benjamin Labatut around John von Neumann’s life, analysed by Karl Sigmund
- A four-page long comment on the importance of preserving scientific US-China relations, despite the growing suspicion in the US that any scientific collaboration with Chinese institutions will benefit Chinese (State) interests. Without falling for a naive approach to such collaborations, and acknowledging the porous boundaries between fundamental and military research, one should acknowledge the great leap forward accomplished by Chinese universities in the past decade that set their researchers at the forefront of science in many fields.
- A paper related with the cover on model collapse in AIs learning from AI-generated data. Just like MCMC learning a proposal from earlier simulations. A natural consequence of over-fitting.
- Another paper on the phase (or quantum) transition of the two-dimensional Ising spin glass (model).
- and the article on predatory conferences I already discussed in August.
