Louis Sharrock

The UCL IMSS Annual Lecture will take place on the 27th April with a keynote from @lestermackey.bsky.social.

The theme is 'Computational Statistics and Machine Learning' and we'll have talks from Alessandro Barp, Paula Cordero Encinar & Po-Ling Loh.

imss2026.github.io

@statisticsucl.bsky.social

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...

Research Studentships

🚨3 Departmental PhD Studentships have now become available. The deadline for applications will be 31 of July. Available for overseas and home students.

www.ucl.ac.uk/statistics/p...

🥳 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

🆕 The ELLIS Unit London (@ucl.ac.uk) will host the first workshop uniting disparate subfields of post-Bayesian methods, including PAC Bayes, generalized Bayes, predictive resampling, Martingale posteriors, and online learning.

📍 London 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
📅 May 15-16
🔗 bit.ly/3GgwZ0G

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...

Exciting to see our ICML 2024 spotlight on Sequential Neural Score Estimation feature in OpenAI’s PaperBench!

openai.com/index/paperb...

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

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!

Job Opportunity at Lancaster University: Senior Research Associate (Prob_AI Hub) We invite applications for a 3 year Post-Doctoral Research Associate position at Lancaster University to join the Prob_AI Hub. The vision of the Prob_AI Hub is to develop a world-leading, diverse and ...

🚀🚀 We’re Hiring! A 3-year postdoc in Probabilistic AI at Lancaster Uni, part of the £8.5M Prob_AI Hub. PhD in Maths/Stats/ML required (AI experience optional). 💰 £39,105-£45,163 📅 Apply by 23 Mar 2025. More info: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... ✉️ p.fearnhead@lancaster.ac.uk #Hiring #AI #Postdoc

Probability at UCL - Colloquium_2025 Friday 21 March 2025, 2-5PM UCL, 1-19 Torrington Place, lecture room 115

We are very pleased to announce the Bloomsbury Probability Colloquium, an afternoon of research talks in Probability hosted by the probability group at UCL.

Date and time: Friday 21st March 2025, 2-5PM

Venue: UCL, Department of Statistical Science, room 115, 1-19 Torrington Place, London

A touch of self-advertisement: I'll be giving a research talk next Tuesday at the Online Monte Carlo Seminar (sites.google.com/view/monte-c...) on one of my favourite topics: the convergence properties of the Random Walk Metropolis algorithm. Please join us!

The recording, for anybody who's interested: youtu.be/FRoia-lszVM?.... Well worth a watch!

Very interesting stuff!

Accelerating statistical inference and experimental design with machine learning - Isaac Newton Institute This workshop focuses on leveraging modern machine learning to accelerate statistical inference, experimental design, and scientific discovery. It features...

The Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge is hosting a workshop on Accelerating Statistical Inference and Experimental Design with Machine Learning June 23 - 27. It includes tutorials on #Bayesian inference, DoE, and diffusion models.

More details at the website:

www.newton.ac.uk/event/rclw03/

Excited to share that today our paper recommender platform www.scholar-inbox.com has reached 20k users! We hope to reach 100k by the end of the year.. Lots of new features are being worked on currently and rolled out soon.

Announcing SGI 2025! Undergrads and MS students: Apply for 6 weeks of paid summer geometry processing research. No experience needed: 1 week tutorials + 5 weeks of projects. Mentors are top researchers in this emerging branch of graphics/computing/math. sgi.mit.edu

Without aiming for anything as precise as a 'best papers of the year' list, it seems a decent time to review some themes and works which I've enjoyed this year. Not all arrived exactly this year, but all have been particularly on my radar in recent times. Anyhow:

📣 Hiring! I am looking for PhD/postdoc candidates to work on foundation models for science at @ULiege, with a special focus on weather and climate systems. 🌏 Three positions are open around deep learning, physics-informed FMs and inverse problems with FMs.

I am hiring a postdoctoral scholar with a start date summer or fall 2025. Projects will be focused on thermodynamically consistent generative models, broadly defined. If you’re interested, please send a CV and one paragraph about why you think you’d be a good fit to rotskoff@stanford.edu

🔊 Super excited to announce the first ever Frontiers of Probabilistic Inference: Learning meets Sampling workshop at #ICLR2025 @iclr-conf.bsky.social!

🔗 website: sites.google.com/view/fpiwork...

🔥 Call for papers: sites.google.com/view/fpiwork...

more details in thread below👇 🧵

The Stein-log-Sobolev inequality and the exponential rate of convergence for the continuous Stein variational gradient descent method The Stein Variational Gradient Descent method is a variational inference method in statistics that has recently received a lot of attention. The method provides a deterministic approximation of the ta...

Missed this when it dropped earlier in the week but looks like a v interesting read (+ answers a long standing open question relating to SVGD): arxiv.org/abs/2412.10295

One #postdoc position is still available at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to work on sampling, high-dimensional data-assimilation, and diffusion/flow models. Applications are open until the end of January. Details:

alexxthiery.github.io/jobs/2024_di...

The slides of my NeurIPS lecture "From Diffusion Models to Schrödinger Bridges - Generative Modeling meets Optimal Transport" can be found here
drive.google.com/file/d/1eLa3...

Score-Optimal Diffusion Schedules Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) offer a flexible framework for sampling from high dimensional data distributions. DDMs generate a path of probability distributions interpolating between a reference ...

Looks very nice:

arxiv.org/abs/2412.07877

Sequential Neural Score Estimation: Likelihood-Free Inference with Conditional Score Based Diffusion Models We introduce Sequential Neural Posterior Score Estimation (SNPSE), a score-based method for Bayesian inference in simulator-based models. Our method, inspired by the remarkable success of score-based ...

For a flavour of Jack’s work, check out our ICML spotlight paper from earlier this year: arxiv.org/abs/2210.04872

Huge thanks to @spmontecarlo.bsky.social and @ritothebayesian.bsky.social for examining his thesis!

Massive congrats to Jack Simons for passing his PhD Viva today 🎉🎉🎉

His thesis is entitled: “Simulation-Based Inference Using Contemporary Generative Methods”.

Jack was supervised by Dr Song Liu and Prof Mark Beaumont at Bristol Uni with a helping hand from me at points along the way.

Splendid stuff; very digestible and usable:

arxiv.org/abs/2412.05239
'Conditions for uniform in time convergence: applications to averaging, numerical discretisations, and mean-field systems'
- Katharina Schuh, Iain Souttar

An old reading list, revisited, reformatted, and put somewhere mildly more permanent:

hackmd.io/@sp-monte-ca...
'A Reading List'