Archive for Robert Burns

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).

no haggis for Burns night!

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 25, 2021 by xi'an

GPUs in computational statistics

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , on January 27, 2012 by xi'an

The workshop in Warwick yesterday went on very quickly! The room was packed. The three first talks were by myself, Christophe and Pierre, so less about GPUs and more about simulation techniques which could benefit from or even require implementation on GPUS. (I did manage to have complete slides this time… More seriously, Christophe’s talk set me thinking on the issue of estimating the likelihood function in ways different (?) from the one used in ABC.) The second half was more novel for me, in that the three talks went into the computing and computer aspects of GPUS, with Chris Holmes doing sparse [Lasso-like] regression on a scale otherwise [i.e. w/o GPUs] impossible, Chris [fourth Chris in the list of speakers!] Barnes explaining ABC for molecular biology and design (a point I plan to discuss on a later post), with even more details about the architecture and programming of GPUs, and Michael Stumpf delivering a grand finale, with essentially three talks into one: network analysis (incl. terrific movie bits incorporated within the beamer slides!), GPUs vs. CPUs and older alternatives, and random generators on GPU, commenting on a recent paper by Salmon et al. (SC, 2011) and showing that true gains in efficiency from using GPUs involved a heavy involvement into the hardware structure… A very exciting day followed by Stilton cheese degustation and haggis (if not poems) to celebrate Burns’ night!

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae let the Lord be thankit.