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).
