Archive for UBC
Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, 2004 CRM-SSC Prize in Statistics winner
Posted in Statistics with tags bouncy particle sampler, British Columbia, Centre de recherches mathématiques, computational statistics, CRM-SSC, machine learning, Montréal, non-reversible MCMC, phylogenetic tree, prize, Québec, Société Statistique du Canada, SSC, UBC, University of British Columbia, Vancouver on May 18, 2024 by xi'an
assistant professor opening at UBC Stats
Posted in Statistics with tags British Columbia, Canada, position, UBC, University of British Columbia, Vancouver on October 29, 2023 by xi'an
A new and exciting position in Statistics at UBC, Vancouver, a great place with more to it than just this terrific view I took on my last visit there, in Dec 2019. Details available there. With deadline on 15 November.
position at UBC
Posted in Statistics with tags academic position, assistant professor position, Canada, UBC, University of British Columbia, Vancouver on November 22, 2021 by xi'an
The Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver invites applications from outstanding new investigators for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor in the area of statistical machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2022 or January 1, 2023.
This position is offered as part of a new, interdisciplinary research cluster, AI Methods for Scientific Impact (AIM-SI) within UBC’s Centre for AI Decision-making and Action (CAIDA). CAIDA consists of over 100 researchers whose research leverages AI; AIM-SI will hire 5 new faculty members across three departments: Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics. Those recruited will join over a dozen existing researchers who are highly active in the core AI Methods research community.
Candidates must have a Ph.D. in Statistics, Biostatistics, or a related field and must demonstrate evidence of research success and a high potential to be leaders in their research field. The successful candidate should have a strong record of research productivity commensurate with their experience and will be expected to develop an independent research program in an area that complements existing Department expertise and aligns with opportunities at UBC. The successful candidate will be expected to effectively supervise Statistics graduate students, collaborate with other faculty members, obtain external funding, teach undergraduate and graduate Statistics courses, and actively participate in departmental activities.
Equity and diversity are essential to academic excellence. An open and diverse community fosters the inclusion of voices that have been underrepresented or discouraged. We encourage applications from members of groups that have been marginalized on any grounds enumerated under the B.C. Human Rights Code, including sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, racialization, disability, political belief, religion, marital or family status, age, and/or status as a First Nation, Métis, Inuit, or Indigenous person.
Applicants will be asked to complete an equity survey. The survey information will not be used to determine eligibility for employment, but will be collated to provide data that can assist us in understanding the diversity of our applicant pool and identifying potential barriers to the employment of designated equity group members. Applicants’ participation in the survey is voluntary and confidential and takes only a minute to complete. Applicants may self-identify in one or more of the designated equity groups, or may also decline to identify in any or all of the questions by choosing “not disclosed.”
All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.
Deadline for application is December 15. More information is available at
https://www.stat.ubc.ca/assistant-professor-aim-si-tenure-track-position
parallel tempering on optimised paths
Posted in Statistics with tags astrostatistics, Bayesian optimisation, Bézier curves, black holes, British Columbia, Burrard Inlet, Canada, Gaussian mixture, imaging, parallel tempering, splines, tempering, UBC, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Vancouver Island on May 20, 2021 by xi'an
Saifuddin Syed, Vittorio Romaniello, Trevor Campbell, and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, whom I met and discussed with on my “last” trip to UBC, on December 2019, just arXived a paper on parallel tempering (PT), making the choice of tempering path an optimisation problem. They address the touchy issue of designing a sequence of tempered targets when the starting distribution π⁰, eg the prior, and the final distribution π¹, eg the posterior, are hugely different, eg almost singular.
“…theoretical analysis of reversible variants of PT has shown that adding too many intermediate chains can actually deteriorate performance (…) [while] on non reversible regime adding more chains is guaranteed to improve performances.”
The above applies to geometric combinations of π⁰ and π¹. Which “suffers from an arbitrarily suboptimal global communication barrier“, according to the authors (although the counterexample is not completely convincing since π⁰ and π¹ share the same variance). They propose a more non-linear form of tempering with constraints on the dependence of the powers on the temperature t∈(0,1). Defining the global communication barrier as an average over temperatures of the rejection rate, the path characteristics (e.g., the coefficients of a spline function) can then be optimised in terms of this objective. And the temperature schedule is derived from the fact that the non-asymptotic round trip rate is maximized when the rejection rates are all equal. (As a side item, the technique exposed in the earlier tempering paper by Syed et al. was recently exploited for a night high resolution imaging of a black hole from the M87 galaxy.)
emergence [jatp]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Travel, University life with tags British Columbia, Burrard Inlet, jatp, sunrise, UBC, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Vancouver Island on December 11, 2019 by xi'an
