Bayes Lectures 2014

[Thomas Bayes]

This series of research talks and discussion forum is in honour of the contribution of Rev Thomas Bayes. Bayes was a student of the University of Edinburgh from 1719 to c. 1722. This yearly workshop follows in footsteps of the Bayes 250 workshop organised in 2011 to mark the 250th anniversary of Rev Bayes's death. Details of earlier meetings in this series are available.

The workshop will start in the afternoon of Wed 28 May and finish in the early afternoon on Thurs 29 May.
 (New!) The workshop schedule with talk abstracts is available here.

Invited speakers:
Alan Gelfand (Duke University, USA) Wildfires in South Africa, Cherry Trees in Japan
Sonia Petrone (Università Bocconi, Italy) Improving Prediction from Dirichlet Process Mixtures via Enrichment
Max Welling (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Bayes in the Age of Big Data
John Winn (Microsoft Research, UK): Probabilistic programming - the future of Bayesian inference?

Attendance and submissions

Registration for the workshop is now closed

Venue

The workshop will be held in the Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton St, Edinburgh. Directions to the Informatics Forum are available.

Accommodation

Participants will need to arrange their own accommodation. Here are two lists of suggested hotels:

Travel Information

Participants will need to make their own travel arrangements. Information about travel to and from Edinburgh Airport is available. A taxi to the city centre from the airport costs about 15GBP to 20GBP one way. There is also an excellent express bus from the airport called Airlink that terminates in the city centre and costs 6GBP for a return journey. The journey to the airport requires approximately 30 minutes from the city centre. The new Edinburgh tram service will start public service on 31 May, just too late for the workshop.

By train the nearest station is Edinburgh Waverley. See National Rail Enquiries for train information.

Wireless Access

Wireless Internet access will be available to all participants. Instructions for accessing the wireless network will be made available at the workshop.

Historical Information

There are several good biographical sources about Bayes. One reference that is enjoyable to read is D. R. Bellhouse, 2004, The Reverend Thomas Bayes, FRS: A Biography to Celebrate the Tercentenary of His Birth, Statistical Science 19 (1): 3–43.

Additionally, you may also enjoy reading the paper that started it all: Thomas Bayes, 1763, An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 53, 370–418. For easier reading this has been reprinted with modern typography in Biometrika, 45(3/4), 293–315, 1958, with a biographical note by G.A. Barnard.

Organisers

Email the organisers at bayes.lectures.edinburgh@gmail.com

Funding

This meeting is supported by the Principal of the University of Edinburgh.