Francesca Crucinio, a researcher from the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick struck Bronze at a competition in the House of Commons, for the excellence of her mathematical research, walking away with the £750 Bronze prize.

PhD student Jeremias Knoblauch has just won a Facebook fellowship: https://research.fb.com/fellows/knoblauch-jeremias/ 
Details of the fellowship here: https://research.fb.com/programs/fellowship/

Jeremias is also a visiting Turing researcher in the DCE programme and his FB application was supported by Professor Mark Girolami and the DCE programme.

Professors Jane Hutton and Saul Jacka have been funded by the Royal Society to run a Hooke Discussion meeting on:

How should pension liabilities be valued? Risk aversion and demographic uncertainty
(link to: https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2019/03/pensions/ )

Monday 25 March 2019 and Tuesday 26 March 2019, at
The Royal Society, London, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AG

Several challenges arise in estimating the liabilities and assets needed for pensions provision. The UK Government has increased the State Pension Age to reflect longevity. For developing countries, achieving reliable estimates of life expectancy is not easy. Actuaries, economists, and statisticians use varied definitions of risk and methods for estimation and forecasting. Disagreement centres on concepts of risk and prudence.

This meeting will air some slow-burn economic and social issues, to initiate a more co-ordinated approach and to dispel some widely-held misapprehensions.

"Judgements made by committees, based on esoteric actuarial arguments, can have large implications for people's lives."

Registration is required.

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