By xi’an
As I am flying back to Paris (with an afternoon committee meeting in München in-between), I am reminiscing on the superlative scientific quality of this MCMski meeting, on the novel directions in computational Bayesian statistics exhibited therein, and on the potential settings for the next meeting. If any.
First, as hopefully obvious from my previous entries, I found the scientific program very exciting, with almost uniformly terrific talks, and a coverage of the field of computational Bayesian statistics that is perfectly tuned to my own interest. In that sense, MCMski is my “top one” conference! Even without considering the idyllic location. While some of the talks were about papers I had already read (and commented here), others brought new vistas and ideas. If one theme is to emerge from this meeting it has to be the one of approximate and noisy algorithms, with a wide variety of solutions and approaches to overcome complexity issues. If anything, I wish the solutions would also incorporate the Boxian fact that the statistical models themselves are approximate. Overall, a fantastic program (says one member of the scientific committee).
Second, as with previous MCMski meetings, I again enjoyed the unique ambience of the meeting, which always feels more relaxed and friendly than other conferences of a similar size, maybe because of the après-ski atmosphere or of the special coziness provided by luxurious mountain hotels. This year hotel was particularly pleasant, with non-guests like myself able to partake of some of their facilities. A big thank you to Anto for arranging so meticulously all the details of such a large meeting!!! I am even more grateful when realising this is the third time Anto takes over the heavy load of organising MCMski. Grazie mille!
Since this is a [and even the!] BayesComp conference, the current section program chair and …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com