News

The CoSInES project is a collaboration of researchers from Universities of Warwick, Bristol, Lancaster, Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute to tackle fundamental challenges in Computational and Bayesian Statistics and key applications in Engineering and Security. The project will run 1st October 2018 till 30th September 2023, is primarily funded by EPSRC and is led by Gareth Roberts. More information about the initiative can be found at

http://www.cosines.org

On November 2nd 2018, the project will be launched with an afternoon of presentations related to the project.

We’d like to invite anyone who would like to attend to register their interest by emailing Shital Desai (S.Desai.3@warwick.ac.uk). Lunch (from 12.15) will be provided and the event will conclude with a short drinks reception to celebrate the beginning of the project. The talks are scheduled to finish by roughly 16.30 and will take place in Warwick University Oculus lecture theatre OC0.02.

The project will very soon be advertising 5 4-year PDRA positions associated with the project. These positions can be based at any of the 5 institutions involved in the grant. Informal enquiries regarding these positions to Gareth Roberts (gareth.o.roberts@warwick.ac.uk) are very welcome.

Provisional timetable of day:

12.15 Lunch next to the Oculus lecture theatre OC0.02

13.00 Gareth Roberts (Warwick): Overview of CoSInES project

13.20 Paul Fearnhead (Lancaster): Continuous-time MCMC and its potential for scalable Bayesian inference

13.45 Mark Briers (ATI): Computationally intensive statistical challenges in Defence and Security

14.05 Sam Livingstone (UCL): On the robustness of gradient-based MCMC

14.30 - 14.50 tea

14.50 Christophe Andrieu (Bristol): On the hypocoercivity of some Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process-Monte Carlo Methods

15.15 Chris Oates (Newcastle, ATI): Statistical modelling and analysis of materials

15.40 Murray Pollock (Warwick): Fusion and Con-fusion for Bayesian analysis of distributed data

16.05 Louis Aslett (Durham, ATI): Privacy and Security in Bayesian Inference

16.30 Drinks Reception

Many congratulations to Theo Damoulas for his promotion to Associate Professor with effect from 1st July 2018. Well done, Theo!

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/news/?newsItem=8a17841b6411e6cd01646245d63a52d4

Kenneth Lim writes about statistical practice and replication in the behavioural sciences for the London Mathematical Society Newsletter: see https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/lms.ac.uk/files/files/NLMS_477_reduced_0.pdf#page=31

 Kenneth's web page: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/research_students/lim/

Daphne Ezer has received an EPSRC Innovation Fellowship to design new methods to help biologists design experiments that learn the structure of gene networks, while minimising research time and costs. This will involve finding a good schedule for laboratory protocols, and dynamically adjusting the schedule in response to the new data generated by the experiments. Finding regulatory links between genes is one of the main research directions explored in both biomedicine and agriculture, and this project will help researchers in academia and industry perform this task more efficiently. This project will be performed in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute and Google Brain Genomics.