A couple of seminars that I wanted to highlight in the next couple of weeks: one from A/Prof Mirko Draca (Department of Economics, University of Warwick) and another from me. Mirko will be speaking in the NIASRA Seminar Series this week at Wollongong, while I’ll be flying home to Brisbane next week to present a talk at the ACEMS Workshop on Intractable Likelihoods & ABC. Abstracts for both talks are below:

I was very lucky to be invited to attend a 5 day workshop at the Casa Matemática Oaxaca (CMO-BIRS), “Computational Statistics and Molecular Simulation: A Practical Cross-Fertilization” where I presented my work on the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter for Bayesian modelling of Raman spectroscopy. A link to the video is here and the abstract for my talk is below. See also commentary on selected talks by one of the organisers, Prof. Xi’an.

I’ve just arXiv’d another revision of my paper on the PFAB algorithm: arXiv:1503.08066v3 [stat.CO]. It includes a rather elegant proof of the exact mean and variance of the sufficient statistic S(y) in the hottest state, when the inverse temperature $\beta = 0$. The proof by my co-author Geoff Nicholls holds for any Potts model with first-order neighbours. That is, the nearest 4 neighbours in a 2D lattice (or 6 neighbours in 3D). For posterity, I present my rather clunkier proof below, which involves induction on dimension for a rectangular lattice.

It was great to be back in Brissie for the first time since my PhD graduation, 3 years ago. The R Consortium have made video of all of the talks available on YouTube – a link to mine is below, along with my slides.

As usual when I set up a new computer, I like to update the list of software that I have installed. This is particularly pertinent when I’m about to move back to Australia and will have to say goodbye to my beloved MacBook Air. Note that I won’t be running R using the Windows Subsystem for Linux, although this is definitely something I’m keen to experiment with at some point. Instead, I’ll be using MRO, since it includes the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) for Windows. This is important if you run R packages (including RcppArmadillo) that make heavy use of linear algebra.

I’ll be attending the final i-Like workshop in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, then heading to ABC in Edinburgh and the ISBA World Meeting before returning to Warwick for BAYSM (the Bayesian Young Statisticians’ Meeting). I’ll also be presenting a talk about bayesImageS at the UseR! conference in Brisbane. Titles and abstracts for my talks are below.

This will be my farewell tour of the UK, as I’ll be relocating back to Australia after an amazing four years as a postdoc at the University of Warwick. After UseR!, I’ll be taking up a lectureship in the School of Mathematics and Statistics and the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) at the University of Wollongong.

The R package gputools has been consumed in the CRANpocalypse, but version 1.1 and earlier can still be downloaded as a source package from the archive. In order to compile it for macOS 10.12.6 (Sierra), you will need to install version 8 of the CUDA Toolkit as well as version 8.2.1 of the Xcode command-line tools. Even then, there are some major configuration issues that need to be dealt with. For the exceptionally brave, the excruciating details are below…

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