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Back home after those two weeks in CiRM for our “research in pair” invitation to work on the new edition of Bayesian Core, I am very grateful for the support we received from CiRM and through it from SMF and CNRS. Being “locked” away in such a remote place brought a considerable increase in concentration and decrease in stress levels. Although I was planning for more, we have made substantial advances on five chapters of the book (out of nine), including a completely new chapter (Chapter 8) on hierarchical models and a thorough rewriting of the normal chapter (Chapter 2), which along with Chapter 1 (largely inspired from Chapter 1 of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R, itself inspired from the first edition of Bayesian Core,!). is nearly done. Chapter 9 on image processing is also quite close from completion, with just the result of a batch simulation running on the Linux server in Dauphine to include in the ABC section. As the only remaining major change is the elimination of reversible jump from the mixture chapter (to be replaced with Chib’s approximation) and from the time-series chapter (to be simplified into a birth-and-death process). Going back to the CiRM environment, I think we were lucky to come during the vacation season as there is hardly anyone on the campus, which means no car and no noise. The (good) feeling of remoteness is not as extreme as in Oberwolfach, but it is truly a quality environment. Besides, being able to work 24/7 in the math library is a major plus. as we could go and grab any reference we needed to check. (Presumably, CiRM is lacking in terms of statistics books, compared with Oberwolfach, still providing most of the references we were looking for.) At last, the freedom to walk right out of the Centre into the national park for a run, a climb or even a swim (in Morgiou, rather than Sugiton) makes working there very tantalising indeed! I thus dearly hope I can enjoy again this opportunity in a near future…
