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Read The Big Wall (in French), a manga by Yoji Kamata & Kunihiko Yokomizo, which my wife bought me while visiting the mountaineering Éditions Guérin in Chamonix. This is in fact a collection of seven stories about climbing and mountaineering, in Japan, the Himalayas, and Canada, all related with the same central climber. It is a bit similar to The Summit of the Gods, another if much earlier gift from my wife!, in that an outstanding climber, Yasushi, faces extreme situations, saves lesser climbers’ live while trying to solve a personal dilemma. The similarity extends to the highly unrealis ..read more

“The World changed significantly since 1973.” (p.10) I read this book, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy, by Ignacio Cofone, upon my return from Warwick the past week. This is a Cambridge University Press 2023 book I had picked from their publication list after reviewing a book proposal for them. A selection made with our ERC OCEAN goals in mind, but without paying enough attention to the book table of contents, since it proved to be a Law book! “People’s inability to assess privacy risks impact people’s behavior toward privacy because it turns the risks into unc ..read more

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This 2023 work on Slice sampler on manifolds, as presented in the algorithms seminar in Warwick during a recent visit of by Mareike Hasenpflug, consists in designing and validating slice samplers for distributions on manifolds. It is mildly connected to some current work on MCMC algorithms on manifolds through coupling techniques by [my friends & coauthors] Elena Bortolado, Pierre Jacob, and Robin Ryder (who escape temporarily the manifold at each step). As in Neal (2003), uniform draws from the (super)level sets are replaced there with one-step Markov moves within the level set,  th ..read more

The next One World ABC webinar is this  Thursday,  the 2nd May, at 9am UK time, with Francesca Crucinio (King’s College London, formerly CREST and even more formerly Warwick) presenting “A connection between Tempering and Entropic Mirror Descent”. a joint work with Nicolas Chopin and Anna Korba (both from CREST) whose abstract follows: This work explores the connections between tempering (for Sequential Monte Carlo; SMC) and entropic mirror descent to sample from a target probability distribution whose unnormalized density is known. We establish that tempering SMC corresponds to ent ..read more

On my last trip to Warwick, the local (RER) train I boarded broke on its way to the CDG airport, after hitting something in a tunnel just three stops short of the airport, with so much delay and misleading communication that I missed my flight. While a minor issue for me, since I managed to work (and blog) in an airport lounge for most of the day—where I crossed path with Numerobis—, while waiting for the only flight to B’ham, this made me to reflect anew on the very poor state of the transportation network in Paris and its suburbs, with such incidents (power failures, broken rails, vetust eng ..read more

A paper in Frontiers attempted modelling the optimization of world-class 400 m and 1,500 m running performances using high-resolution data. “In the present study, rather than using statistical analyses of 100-m split times or big data, we choose to analyze a select sample of World-class athletes individually using high-resolution data and fit a mathematical model to their pacing profiles. This mathematical model allows us to perform further predictive simulations and analyze the effect  of different physiological variables on performance. “ The model used in this analysis is a determinis ..read more

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