Congratulations to Dr Antoine Luciano, who defended his PhD on "Contributions to Bayesian Simulation-Based Inference"! I had a wonderful time supervising Antoine's PhD (jointly with Christian Robert), it's always emotional to reach the end.

Congratulations to Dr Jinyuan Zhang, who defended his PhD in Edinburgh today! I was happy to be the external examiner. Jinyuan worked on Hidden Markov Models for Stylometry, to attribute authorship in texts with several authors. The thesis was supervised by Gordon Ross.

This etymology is wild! #TIL The English word “average”, originally “custom duty” or “loss in transported goods”, comes from the French “avarie” (meaning “damage to a ship or cargo”) from the Italian “avaria” (same meaning), …

Congratulations to Dr Roan Talbut, who successfully defended their PhD on "Tropical Geometry for Phylogenetic Statistics"! It was a pleasure to read the thesis and examine the viva. I learned a lot!

I'm happy to join the board of Statistics and Computing as Associate Editor! link.springer.com/journal/1122... I'll be in great company, with lots of fantastic colleagues. And congratulations to my old friend and fellow bird enthusiast @pierrealquier.bsky.social who has also just joined as AE!

Still think this was one of the best power moves of all time www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛 As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...

New article in collaboration with @chrisbuckley.bsky.social , @thomaspellard.bsky.social @robinryder.bsky.social on the phylogeny of Kra-Dai languages and of the looms used by their speakers: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We’re hiring! Join Imperial's Department of Mathematics as an Assistant, Associate or Full Professor in Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Stats or Math Finance. We have several posts available, so apply by 30 Nov 2025! imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-... @imperialmaths.bsky.social

Absolutely crazy that Harvard had to resort to this. PhD students are society's future experts. What happens when even elite universities can no longer afford to train them?

Applications are invited for Chapman Fellow in Mathematics (Statistics Section) at the Department of Mathematics. Closing date: 11 November 2025 www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs//search...

Jane Goodall was my first childhood hero, as I loved animals as a kid and was inspired by her story. I still remember the National Geographic specials about her. RIP.

We are hiring! We are inviting applications for the Chapman Fellowship in Statistics at Imperial College London. This is a kind of super-postdoc: 3 years contract, excellent working conditions, and candidates are expected to propose an independent research plan. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs//search...

Proposals for contributed talks & posters are now being accepted for the 2026 ISBA World Meeting! The world meeting will take place in Nagoya, Japan between 28 June and 3 July, 2026. Proposals may be submitted here: forms.gle/dVTUrdEuVF6g...

The newest section of ISBA has been formed to promote Bayesian methods in the social sciences! Find out more 👇

I'm super excited to announce that ISBA @isba-bayesian.bsky.social has voted to start a new section on Bayesian Social Sciences! It will be a great way to further collaborations with many disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities. bss-isba.github.io

Really nice coverage of our work on bonobo syntax with Simon Townsend and Martin Surbeck, by @rfieldmouse.bsky.social. Thanks so much, Rachel! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A great overview of SBI by @fxbriol.bsky.social If you missed the conference, check out his slides!

Do diversification rates and molecular evolution covary? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s surprising how much falls into place if we assume they do doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

The wonderful Niamh Cahill is recruiting a PhD student (co-supervised by me!) to work on estimating and projecting population exposure to extreme sea levels. Please contact me if interested!

I am pleased to announce that together with some friends, we are organising a workshop on Non-Reversible MCMC Sampling, taking place at Newcastle University from 8–10 September 2025. Details on the programme and registration can be found at the workshop website (sites.google.com/view/probai-...).

Exciting new opening @nccrlanguage.bsky.social with the option of permanent extension. If you work in cutting-edge stats and are interested in joining a highly inter-disciplinary, vibrant community, don't hesitate to apply at tinyurl.com/3fxwjk8e

New on the blog: Using Bayesian tools to be a better frequentist Turns out that for neg. bin. regression with small samples, standard frequentist tools fail to achieve their stated goals. Bayesian computation ends up providing better frequentist guarantees. www.martinmodrak.cz/2025/07/09/u...

New preprint on arXiv, led by PhD student Antoine Luciano:  Permutations accelerate Approximate Bayesian Computation. arxiv.org/abs/2507.06037

New paper, led by @ambresalis.bsky.social and just out in Scientific reports: Birds combined calls more than 11 million years ago www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This. ⤵️ Some of us are manifesting for the algorithm to be called Metropolis-Rosenbluth-Teller-Hastings, or MRTH. It better recognizes the scientists who had an instrumental role in the original paper. It's what I use in my papers and lectures. I hope it will eventually become the standard name!

Is language complexity more likely to evolve in small, isolated populations? We test this idea using global occurrence of one particular form of morphological complexity - polysynthesis (complex word forms that embody whole phrases) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Enjoying discovering Singapore, and ready for BayesComp 2025! I'll be giving a talk tomorrow (Wed) on Saddlepoint Monte Carlo and its application to exact Ecological Inference. Come say hi at 16:10 in room LT51 - it's a cool paper, I swear! arxiv.org/abs/2410.18243

Sloppier-than-usual academic spam. 😬 I'd never thought of publishing a paper whose title would be my name. Sounds like a highly efficient plan, it would eliminate the whole headache of trying to pick a good title! 🙄

The Scientific Committee welcomes proposals for Invited Sessions for the 2026 #ISBA World Meeting. Please submit proposals using this form: forms.gle/5G3xJWJaaE6Q... Proposals will be accepted until 11:59pm (anywhere on Earth) on 6 July 2025. Also see the conf. site: isba2026.github.io

This looks like a great workshop: ➡️ An Introduction to Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences, Lugano (Switzerland), 18-22 August 2025 Bayesian regression, network models, Bayesian clustering… www.usi.ch/en/education...

Phew, that was close! Congrats to Nicusor Dan for becoming President of Romania 🇷🇴 Besides his tremendous work in Bucharest in the past 20 years, he's a double golden medalist 🥇 at the International Math Olympiad. Confident in how he will lead.

❗️❗️ We are organising the first edition of the “Bayes in Bayonne: Methods Workshop for Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences” on the 17th June, at the Iker lab of the CNRS in Bayonne!!! All the relevant information and link to registration can be found here: bayes-bayonne-workshop.gitlab.io

I have been working on a new R package, blvim: github.com/fabrice-ross... A short introduction to the package is given here: fabrice-rossi.github.io/blog/posts/b... BLV models are useful in archaeology, but their results are very sensitive to their core parameters.

Two Fully-Funded PhD positions at Auckland Uni! Come help us understand the past and future of global cultural and linguistic diversity. #linguistics #evolution #academia #phd www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

La juge est menacée de mort sous protection policière à cause de ce genre de propos alors que : - Elle est pas au syndicat de la magistrature - Elle n'a pas jugé seule, ils étaient 3 - Je sais pas combien ça fait de juges, mais Le Pen a fait 45 recours en 10 ans. Tous ont échoué.

Recent preprint on arXiv : Phylogenetic latent space models for network data What if we observe a network, and believe that a phylogenetic tree explains the interactions?

The University of Auckland offers 2 fully funded 3-year PhD positions to study global cultural and linguistic diversity. Applicants must have relevant degrees and progra… https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/understanding-the-past-and-future-of-global-cultural-and-linguistic-diversity/?p183755 #phd

This looks amazingly cool. Looking forward to reading what comes out of this PhD.

TIL that phytools::fitMk has a (hidden, undocumented) logscale parameter. By default, logscale=FALSE, but setting logscale=TRUE improves convergence.

🚀 Exciting news! We're proposing a new *Bayesian Deep Learning* section within @isba-bayesian.bsky.social . If you support this initiative, add your name to the petition and help make it happen! 🔗 Petition: tinyurl.com/527vaamz Sinead Williamson, Theo Papamarkou @vincefort.bsky.social Sara Wade 1/2

3 year PDRA position as part of the OCEAN project (www.oceanerc.com) to work with Gareth Roberts, myself and other OCEAN Researchers on a range of topics around scalable distributed computation. Details at warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/appcentre...; please share with anyone who might be interested.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.” Absurd we still need to go through this 🧪👩‍🔬

Nature published a misguided op-ed on using LLM's in peer review. The author suggested LLM's could be an aid. But I was interested in a larger question. Can ChatGPT do a peer reivew? So I uploaded a first-submission manuscript for it to review. I also have human reviews for comparison.

Unbelievable news. Pancreatic is one of the deadliest cancers. New paper shows personalized mRNA vaccines can induce durable T cells that attack pancreatic cancer, with 75% of patients cancer free at three years—far, far better than standard of care. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Federico Pavone, Daniele Durante, Robin J. Ryder Phylogenetic latent space models for network data https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11868

New preprint presenting a method that can be seen as a new way to complement phylogenetic approaches in comparative linguistics, together with Frederic Blum (PhD student at DLCE/Leipzig). From Isolates to Families: Using Neural Networks for Automated Language Affiliation doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Check out our new method for summarising BEAST trees. The CCD0-MAP tree gives much more accurate results than MCC tree. It returns the tree that maximises the product of sampled clade probabilities regardless of whether that tree was sampled. Highly recommend :) journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

You publish papers in statistics journals and you're proud of them? But, when your friends ask "are you coming to AISTATS with us?", you feel sad and you regret not to submit papers to conferences? Well, this message is for you! There is now a Journal-to-conference track at #AISTATS2025!