Congratulations to Jenning Lim on a successful defence of his thesis, "Particle Algorithms for Inference of Probabilistic Models" today, a well deserved success! And thanks to @chris-nemeth.bsky.social and Theo Damoulas for acting as examiners.

Congratulations to Fernando Zepeda on their viva today at @warwickstats.bsky.social; I spent a very enjoyable afternoon with @louisaslett.bsky.social discussing Fernando's thesis, "Non-Reversible Extensions of the ALPS Methodology for Multimodal and Transdimensional Sampling".

🔥 WANTED: Student Researcher to join me, @vdebortoli.bsky.social, Jiaxin Shi, Kevin Li and @arthurgretton.bsky.social in DeepMind London. You'll be working on Multimodal Diffusions for science. Apply here google.com/about/career...

Two assistant prof. vacancies at Warwick Statistics: warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/appcentre... (deadline 25 January 2025 at 11:55pm). CSML applications very welcome!

Dr. Shishen Lin has joined us as a Research Fellow on the ERC Synergy OCEAN project from September. His research is in learning in games, black-box optimisation and evolutionary algorithms. He is also interested in reinforcement learning and its combination with evolutionary computation methods.

Postdoc, Newcastle University (UK). PINCODE researches Monte Carlo Fusion methods: this postdoc will help developing #rstats packages that bring this methodological work to life, as well as opportunities to contribute to further methodological development. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOZ807/r...

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the RSS CSML will take place on 2 December, 12:00–13:00 (UK time) via Zoom. The meeting is open to all and will review the section’s activities from the past year, outline plans for the year ahead, and present the committee for 2026.

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...

Thinking about doing a PhD in statistics, probability or mathematical finance? Want to learn more about doctoral training at Warwick Statistics? Register now for our upcoming PhD Open Days. Find more information and book your place here: warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

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...

Congratulations to Rocco Caprio -- thesis defended, minor corrections done and graduation imminent. Thanks to Gareth Roberts and Andrew Duncan for examining the thesis. Rocco is now a Prob-AI-funded research fellow warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/stat... and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

There are a couple of vacancies in Wollongong for Maths/Stats lecturers: www.uow.edu.au/about/jobs/j...

Some fun news: We're hiring! Lectureship (analogous to Assistant Prof.) in Statistical Science and AI, in the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol. Closing date 13 October 2025; link below! www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

RcppSMC 0.2.9 on CRAN: Maintenance Sequential Monte Carlo / Particle Filters for R dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2025/09... #rstats #rcpp

An announcement, which might be of some interest: In the period 2022-2024, myself and a number of other postdocs on the "CoSInES" and "Bayes4Health" EPSRC grants were involved in organising a number of internal tutorial workshops, on topics relevant to researchers in computational statistics.

As evidence that this prediction wasn't too bad, [https://academic.oup.com/biomet/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biomet/asaf061/8223075](Rocco's second paper), showing the fast convergence of the venerable EM algorithm using a rather fun functional analysis argument, is in press for Biometrika.

Applications are still open for another two weeks.

If anyone is, or knows anyone who is, looking for a postdoc position to work on the foundations of scalable inference and such... applications for a postdoctoral position at Warwick as a part of the OCEAN project (oceanerc.com) are open until 20th August at warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/appcentre....

New work on inference for partially observed (hypoelliptic) SDEs in frequentist/Bayesian regimes. Splitting schemes & controlled SMC (+ bridges) to recover the (pseudo)likelihood of interest arxiv.org/abs/2507.14535 Work led by Shu, with @adamjohansen.bsky.social and @bayesianstats.bsky.social

Second blog post about nested sampling: numerical experiments; https://statisfaction-blog.github.io/posts/30-06-2025-nested-sampling-experiments/

Shunichi Amari has been awarded the 40th (2025) Kyoto Prize in recognition of his pioneering research in the fields of artificial neural networks, machine learning, and information geometry www.riken.jp/pr/news/2025...

We are recruiting! A three-year postdoctoral position at Warwick as part of the “Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence” hub on the mathematical foundations of AI. Further details at the link: warwick-careers.tal....

🥳 Congratulations are in order for: our newly promoted professors FX Robin Paul Terry as well as for our newly promoted Associated Professors Tom H Alex D Takoua Emma Brieuc

Post blog on an attempt of giving a simple introduction to NS (nested sampling), and NS-SMC (SMC samplers based on NS): https://statisfaction-blog.github.io/posts/04-06-2025-simpler-nested-sampling-identity/nested.html

I'm sure this will be the first of many.

🚨 New paper: “Towards Adaptive Self-Normalized IS”, @ IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop. TLDR; To estimate µ = E_p[f(θ)] with SNIS, instead of doing MCMC on p(θ) or learning a parametric q(θ), we try MCMC directly on p(θ)| f(θ)-µ | (variance-minimizing proposal). arxiv.org/abs/2505.00372

Announcing our 2025/26 William Guy Lecturers 📢 Focusing on "Statistics and AI," these talks will inspire students about the role of statistics in our tech-driven world. 🔗 Read more: rss.org.uk/news-publica...

Tim Y. J. Wang, Juan Kuntz, O. Deniz Akyildiz Training Latent Diffusion Models with Interacting Particle Algorithms https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12412

If anyone missed the RSS Gradient Flow workshop back in March, videos are now available...

Applications are still open for our MSc in Statistics. In case you have any questions, we have a Live Chat this Friday (16th May). To register join here: meetandengage.com/un... For more information, see warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

RcppSMC 0.2.8 on CRAN: Maintenance Sequential Monte Carlo / Particle Filters for R dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2025/05... #rcpp #rstats

🗣️ Just 2 weeks until the CRiSM 2.0 - Conference 2025 here at the Warwick Statistics. We can’t wait to welcome you from Wednesday 21st – Friday 23rd May 2025. If you haven’t already, register for the three-day conference event now (deadline today - 8th May!) 🔗 tinyurl.com/2d2b9b7a

The BayesComp workshop on 'Bayesian Computation and Inference with Misspecified Models' will take place in Singapore on the 16-17th June. We have an open call for posters/contributed calls, with a deadline on the 1st May. More details on the website: postbayes.github.io/BayesMisspec...

Warwick's Statistics department has recently come by funding for a few additional PhD scholarships for the coming year; details of funding still available are at warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/stat... if anyone is in the market for a PhD position starting in October 2025.

Our next Discussion Meeting will focus on our journal paper exploring the statistical aspects of the Covid-19 response We caught up with co-author Simon Wood on the paper and what he'll discuss at next month's meeting rss.org.uk/news-publica... Register to attend here ⬇️ rss.org.uk/training-eve...

I just enjoyed Elsiddig Awadelkraim's thesis defence. Aside from the substantial technical interest, it was interesting to see the KAUST approach to the viva for the first time.

*G-Research Warwick PhD Scholarship* In 2025, one scholarship funded by a generous donation from G-Research (www.gresearch.com/) will be awarded to an outstanding student undertaking a PhD within the Department of Statistics – Apply now. warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

Nicolas Chopin will speak at our CRiSM colloquium *today* at 11am. NIcolas will speak on "Saddlepoint Monte Carlo and its Application to Exact Ecological Inference". For the benefit of people on campus who may be able to attend, the talk will be in MS.02, followed by lunch. warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

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.

I will be one of the supervisors on this. Please pass on to any UK students who may be interested.

It's a pleasure to report that arxiv.org/abs/1805.03924 has been accepted by JRSSB. Rob and Leah, in particular, have done a huge amount of work on this and it's nice to see it reach a conclusion! It makes explicit connections between nested sampling and SMC and shows how they can be exploited.

This afternoon I was privileged to examine Alex Glyn-Davies, who produced a great thesis on aspects of physics-informed inference for DE models (arxiv.org/abs/2209.15609, arxiv.org/abs/2409.07101 and arxiv.org/abs/2409.06560) and some anomaly detection for good measure doi.org/10.1016/j.pa....

JOB OPENING at University of Bristol: -- Lecturer in Statistics or Machine Learning -- (x 2 positions available) -- application deadline: 31 March, 2025 Details at www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de... Come join us!

The @royalstatsoc.bsky.social William Guy Lectureship this year has a "statistics and AI" focus, and may be of interest to some in our community.

If anyone is thinking of registering for this, I understand that there are still some spaces available, but the room this event is taking place in has a limited capacity which is likely to be reached... so to avoid disappointment it would be safer to register sooner rather than later ;-).

We are excited to have Prof. Nicolas Chopin (ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris) presenting at the CRiSM colloquium next month. Nicolas will speak on "Saddlepoint Monte Carlo and its Application to Exact Ecological Inference" warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

A co-author (and friend!) is hiring his first post doc in Linköping University, Sweden. It seems the application deadline is not settled yet, so you have *plenty of time* to c̶o̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶r̶ applyi̶n̶g̶ ! The department is strong and so is he. zz.zabemon.com/blogs/2025/0...

Registration is now open for the 2nd RSS/Turing Workshop on Gradient Flows for Sampling, Inference, and Learning at rss.org.uk/training-eve.... Date: Monday 24 March 2025, 10.00AM - 5.00PM Location: The Alan Turing Institute

I'm really looking forward to the CRiSM 2.0 Conference warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/stat... from 21st-23rd May. We've been lucky enough to get a really nice list of speakers; registrations open now if anyone is in the market for some interesting talks in May.

Jeremias Knoblauch and other colleagues and friends in UCL launched a "Post-Bayes seminar series". Their will be many blocks of talks, including a series on PAC-Bayes (probably starting in September 2025). The first talk (by Jeremias) is next week. Please have a look: postbayes.github.io/seminar/