Has google scholar degraded recently for anyone else? I'm getting less relevant results and lots of server error messages. Maybe servers are being repurposed for LLMs instead.

Sending my draft maths to Claude and getting lots of corrections back - it's like being a phd student again!

The next OWABI seminar www.warwick.ac.uk/owabi is Oksana Chkrebtii (Ohio State University) who will talk about "Likelihood-free Posterior Density Learning for Uncertainty Quantification in Inference Problems" on Thursday the 30th April at 1pm UK time (note the different time!).

I missed a few of these seminars due to teaching clashes, and this looks like an exciting one to return to

Approximate Bayes Seminar@approxbayesseminar.bsky.social · 5mo ago

OWABI⁷, 25 March 2026: Robust Simulation Based Inference (11am UK time) Speaker: Larry Wasserman (Carnegie Mellon University) Title: Robust Simulation Based Inference warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

Making great progress with dissertation marking

ICML reviewing done ✅ I'm free! ...to work on the dissertation marking deadline 😐

The next OWABI seminar will be given by Shreya Sinha Roy (Warwick), who will talk about "Prequential posteriors" on Thursday the 26th February at 11am UK time. arxiv.org/abs/2511.1... www.warwick.ac.uk/owabi MS Teams link: teams.microsoft.com/...

Prequential posteriors

Data assimilation is a fundamental task in updating forecasting models upon observing new data, with applications ranging from weather prediction to online reinforcement learning. Deep generative...

arxiv.org

New preprint 📢 arxiv.org/abs/2602.09161 Lead by Sherman Khoo (PhD student at Compass CDT), with Song Liu and Mark Beaumont. We adjust SBI summaries at test time to improve robustness.

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistic...

arxiv.org

Tomorrow's OWABI seminar by Louis Sharrock (UCL), who will talk about "Sequential Neural Score Estimation: Likelihood-free inference with conditional score base diffusion models" (29th Jan, 11am UK time). Join: teams.microsoft.com/... Meeting ID: 388 990 396 214 49 Passcode: f3Dh22XL

Updating my lecture notes to use jagsUI (kenkellner.com/jagsUI/) in place of rjags, and it's a great fix for lots of minor teaching pain points #rstats

The Zen of Reviewer 2

Sam Power@spmontecarlo.bsky.social · 9mo ago

This viral ICLR review has some very fun excerpts. I look forward to wheeling out "In the current impetuous and intricate society, if one aspires to be a scholar, it is imperative to attain inner calm" after writing the world's most demanding review.

New paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.06351. We compare different MCMC kernels for ABC-SMC, and recommend a one- hit kernel with mixture proposal. (Repost with corrected link!)

A Comparison of Kernels for ABC-SMC

A popular method for likelihood-free inference is approximate Bayesian computation sequential Monte Carlo (ABC-SMC) algorithms. These approximate the posterior using a population of particles, which a...

arxiv.org

The 1st OWABI talk of the Season will be given by François-Xavier Briol (University College London). who will talk about "Multilevel neural simulation-based inference".

Multilevel neural simulation-based inference

Neural simulation-based inference (SBI) is a popular set of methods for Bayesian inference when models are only available in the form of a simulator. These methods are widely used in the sciences...

arxiv.org

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...

Join us online for a discussion on “Statistical exploration of the Manifold Hypothesis” and an opportunity to explore the intersection of geometry, statistics and machine learning. 📅 Wed 08 Oct | 🕓 4–6pm UK 🔗 Register + download the paper: rss.org.uk/training-eve...

Feels like conference attendees are getting younger

Conference travel, morning to evening

📣 Please share: We invite submissions to the 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (#AISTATS 2026) and welcome paper submissions at the intersection of AI, machine learning, statistics, and related areas. [1/3]

New preprint: SBI with foundation models! Tired of training or tuning your inference network, or waiting for your simulations to finish? Our method NPE-PF can help: It provides training-free simulation-based inference, achieving competitive performance with orders of magnitude fewer simulations! ⚡️

Paper on normalizing flow transformations for heavy tails 🦕 arxiv.org/abs/2406.16971 My co-author Tennessee Hickling will be presenting the poster at ICML icml.cc/virtual/2025...

The next OWABI Seminar will take place during BayesComp 2025 in Singapore, on Thursday 19 June at 8pm Singapore time (1pm in Tórshavn). Speakers are: Filippo Pagani and Maurizio Filippone. Link to join: monash.zoom.us/j/810... Meeting ID: 810 5099 4376 Passcode: 137607

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

monash.zoom.us

The next OWABI seminar is quickly approaching, with two talks live from BioInference 2025 (bioinference.github....) on 29th May,10am UK time. Speakers: Andrew Golightly, Henrik Häggström. Links to the mailing list, to receive the Teams link to the talks, can be found on warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

When your analysis uses a very strong prior

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

ISBA 2026: Call for Invited Sessions & Panel Discussions

The Scientific Committee invites the submission of proposals for Invited Sessions & Panel Discussions for the 2026 ISBA World Meeting, to be held in Nagoya, Japan from 28 June to 3 July, 2026. Invited...

forms.gle

Scientists on Bluesky, here's one of the best feeds I've found here: Paper Skygest - a feed of posts containing research papers shared by people you follow.

The next OWABI seminar www.warwick.ac.uk/owabi is quickly approaching, being scheduled on Thursday the 27th March at 11am UK time. Our next speaker is Meïli Baragatti (Université de Montpellier), who will talk about "Approximate Bayesian Computation with Deep Learning and Conformal Prediction".

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

Warwick Statistics@warwickstats.bsky.social · last yr.

PhD opportunity: 'Unravelling the sound underground: Detecting and estimating earthworm abundance using low-frequency vibrations'. This project uses signal processing, modelling, and data science to analyse earthworm movements measured from soil geophones, an emerging technology with much potential.

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!

Our next OWABI talk will be given by Meïli Baragatti (Assistant Professor Institut Agro Montpellier) on Approximate Bayesian Computation with Deep Learning and Conformal prediction on Thursday the 27th March 2025. More info will follow.

Our next talk will be on Thursday the 27th February at 11am UK time. Our next speaker is Ayush Bharti (Aalto University), who will talk about "Cost-aware simulation-based inference". To receive the link, sign up here: listserv.csv.warwick...