Robin Ryder

isba-bulletin.github.ioisba-bulletin.github.io

Many thanks to ISBA for taking a stand and for their support!

International Society for Bayesian Analysis@isba-bayesian.bsky.social

ISBA has released a statement on compulsory Article Processing Charges (APCs). Open access should remove barriers for readers without creating new ones for authors. We call for publishing models that are both open and equitable. Read more: isba-bulletin.github.io/ISBABulletin...

bayesforshs3.sciencesconf.orgBayesian Methods for the Social Sciences III - Sciencesconf.org Sciencesconf.org

Conference: Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences III, Dublin, 9-11 December 2026. Join us! bayesforshs3.sciencesconf.org

The last two events in this series (Paris 2022, Amsterdam 2024) were a great success and I'm really looking forward to this conference.

bayesforshs3.sciencesconf.orgBayesian Methods for the Social Sciences III - Sciencesconf.org Sciencesconf.org

Call for posters is open until 16 October. Registration (only 70€) is open until 20 November. bayesforshs3.sciencesconf.org?lang=en

bayesforshs3.sciencesconf.orgBayesian Methods for the Social Sciences III - Sciencesconf.org Sciencesconf.org

Conference: Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences III, Dublin, 9-11 December 2026. Join us! bayesforshs3.sciencesconf.org

The event will bring together statisticians, mathematicians and social scientists around the theme of Bayesian statistical methods for the social sciences.

Day 1: tutorials on * Bayesian methods in Political Science * Bayesian methods for pairwise and ranked data * High-dimensional Bayesian model selection Days 2 and 3: research talks and posters. Networks! Demography! Causal inference!

imperial.ac.ukDescriptionPlease note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

Join us! We are hiring Chapman Fellows in Statistics, within the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London, commencing September 2027. We welcome applications across the breadth of Statistical Science. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

These posts provide an excellent opportunity for recent PhD graduates seeking to pursue an academic career in Statistics. You will produce independent and original research in Statistics within a world-leading institution, and teach undergraduate students.

The positions are fixed-term for 3 years. Salary range: £50,733 - £59,484 per annum Application deadline: 29 October 2026. Contact me (Robin Ryder) if you have any questions.

mathandai.orgDeclaration — Math and AIRead the declaration and add your name.

12 Sept

A strong call to remember what Mathematics research is actually about. Thanks you for writing this. (I signed.)

Terence Tao@teorth.bsky.social

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

Robin Ryder reposted

Andrew Gelman et al.

@statmodeling.bsky.social

10 July

18 Associate Editors resign from Statistics and Computing editorial board: Problems with commercial scholarly publishing, and what does this all mean? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/07/10/1...

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu 18 Associate Editors resign from Statistics and Computing editorial board: Problems with commercial scholarly publishing, and what does this all mean? | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and S...

Robin Ryder reposted

Retraction Watch

@retractionwatch.com

9 July

Th resigning editors say the publisher’s decision to become fully open access is “irreconcilable with our vision of science.” According to the journal’s homepage, all submissions from July 1 that end up in the journal will be subject to a $2,990 article processing charge (APC).

retractionwatch.com‘The exploitation still remains’: Stats journal associate editors resign over $3,000 publishing chargeEighteen associate editors of the journal Statistics and Computing have announced they will resign after Springer Nature announced the journal would require a fee to publish. In a July 8 stat…

I have just resigned from the board of "Statistics and Computing", along with 17 other Associate Editors. This was a difficult decision: this great journal has published many tremendous articles under the leadership of EiC Ajay Jasra, and before him David Hand, Gilles Celeux, and Mark Girolami.

robinryder.wordpress.comResigning from the editorial board of Statistics and ComputingAlong with 17 other Associate Editors, I have just resigned from the editorial board of Statistics and Computing. This was a difficult decision, since it is a great journal, which has published man…

The resignation letter is here, along with the list of signatories which will be kept up to date as it expands: robinryder.wordpress.com/2026/07/08/r...

You can also read the letter directly here.

Springer Nature recently announced that for all future articles, authors would have to pay Article Processing Charges of $2990.

@r-foundation.bsky.social

This will impose massive financial barriers for colleagues who do not have access to funding, will create a further gap between institutions, and the journal will eventually lose its appeal as authors publish elsewhere. We do not wish to be part of this system.

Robin Ryder reposted

The R Foundation

17 June

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026

rousseeuwprize.orgThe Rousseeuw Prize for StatisticsThe Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics is a biennial prize to celebrate outstanding contributions to statistics research.

Robin Ryder reposted

Pierre Alquier

@pierrealquier.bsky.social

29 May

Reposting a very exciting job offer (post-doc) from Pierre Jacob's account on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/posts/pierre...

inshs.cnrs.frWhat the dance language of bees really has in common with human languageBees communicate information about food sources using a sophisticated "dance language".

22 May

Nice piece on our recent paper, led by the always amazing @phschlenker.bsky.social

CNRS Sciences humaines & sociales@cnrsshs.bsky.social

The waggle dance of #bees is recognized as a remarkable communication system, but it is usually thought to have properties that are wholly distinct from human #language. 🐝 A new study revises this verdict : 👉 www.inshs.cnrs.fr/en/cnrsinfo/...

Robin Ryder reposted

Thomas Dietterich

@tdietterich.bsky.social

13 May

We are implementing a similar policy at @arxiv.bsky.social. If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can't trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by...

Robin Ryder reposted

Grégoire Clarté

@gclarte.bsky.social

10 Apr

I was told the Wave model in linguistics had not been formalised. Here is an attempt at it. Note that many things remain to be done, check the discussion for that. The method/model I propose, WaST, can be used on any cognacy dataset. I'll put the code on git soon. arxiv.org/abs/2604.08220

arxiv.orgWaST: a formalisation of the Wave model with associated statistical inference and applicationsWe propose a mathematical formalisation of the ``wave model'' originally developed in historical linguistics but with further applications in human sciences. This model assumes new traits appear in a population and spread to nearby populations depending on their closeness. It is mostly used to describe joint evolution of closely related populations, for example of several dialects. These situations of permanent contact are not accurately represented by its competitors based on tree structures. We built a fully Bayesian generative model where innovation spread along a fixed graph and disappear according to a death process. We then develop a Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs sampler to sample from the posterior distribution on the graph. We test our method on simulated datasets as well as on several real dataset.

Robin Ryder reposted

rgyalrong.bsky.social

@rgyalrong.bsky.social

2 Apr

Our chapter on the tree model (with @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @robinryder.bsky.social ) is at last published online: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.comFamily Tree ModelThe family tree remains the main metaphor for describing the evolutionary history and relationships of languages. Languages, like biological species, evolve following processes such as descent with m...

Robin Ryder reposted

Rafe Meager (they/them)

@economeager.bsky.social

15 Mar

I only knew Chris Sims' work, and I wish I had got to meet him. But to the extent that we know something of each other through what we put out in the world, here is my personal biased favourite of his: Why Econometrics Should Always and Everywhere Be Bayesian sims.princeton.edu/yftp/EmetSoc...

sims.princeton.edusims.princeton.edu

Robin Ryder reposted

Arthur Charpentier

@freakonometrics.bsky.social

7 Mar

"Quand les bars-tabacs ferment : l’érosion du lien social local et la progression du vote d’extrême droite en France" www.cepremap.fr/2026/01/quan... file:///Users/arthurcharpentier/Downloads/Figure_1-Note.png

Robin Ryder reposted

Culture Conference

@cultconf.bsky.social

2 Mar

What a pre-conference workshop on Bayesian statistical methods—a powerful toolkit for our community! 📊 Many thanks to Daniel Redhead and Ramona Roller for guiding us through STRAND and to Michael Chimento for the introduction to STbayes. And thank you to all participants for their energy! 🙌

Robin Ryder reposted

Andrew Rambaut (🐏🎀)

@arambaut.bsky.social

28 Feb

Replying to @arambaut.bsky.social

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

artic-network.github.ioPearTree — Phylogenetic Tree Viewer

Robin Ryder reposted

Pat Savage

@patrickesavage.bsky.social

23 Feb

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪  You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do! I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

deadlanguagesociety.comHow far back in time can you understand English?An experiment in language change

22 Feb

So cool! Mostly fine until 1300, understood a fair bit of 1200, and close to nothing in 1100

Colin Gorrie@colingorrie.bsky.social

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

Congratulations to Dr Antoine Luciano, who defended his PhD on "Contributions to Bayesian Simulation-Based Inference"! I had a wonderful time supervising Antoine's PhD (jointly with Christian Robert), it's always emotional to reach the end.

The third project is ongoing, on using some neural network methods to accelerate ABC.

Antoine will be spending the next few months in Berkeley. You should definitely try to hire him as a postdoc!

link.springer.comInsufficient Gibbs sampling - Statistics and ComputingIn some applied scenarios, the availability of complete data is restricted, often due to privacy concerns; only aggregated, robust and inefficient statistics derived from the data are made accessible....

Antoine's PhD consists of 3 separate projects. The first, Insufficient Gibbs Sampling, relies on data augmentation to sample from the posterior based only on robust but insufficient statistics (e.g. the median, quantiles…), a common situation when privacy matters. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

arxiv.orgPermutations accelerate Approximate Bayesian Computation

The second project is on using permutations for Approximate Bayesian Computation, see this thread. bsky.app/profile/robi...

Robin Ryder@robinryder.bsky.social

New preprint on arXiv, led by PhD student Antoine Luciano: Permutations accelerate Approximate Bayesian Computation. arxiv.org/abs/2507.06037

Congratulations to Dr Jinyuan Zhang, who defended his PhD in Edinburgh today! I was happy to be the external examiner. Jinyuan worked on Hidden Markov Models for Stylometry, to attribute authorship in texts with several authors. The thesis was supervised by Gordon Ross.

The associated paper isn't online yet, so you'll have to be patient to read it. Code should soon be available, since that's one of the corrections we requested. ;-)

Now en route to Paris for another PhD viva tomorrow: Antoine Luciano, supervised by Xian Robert and myself. Stay tuned!

Examples of applications: * the novel "Good Omens" was co-written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Who wrote which parts? * take text written partly by a human and partly by a LLM. Which parts are due to the LLM?

Jinyuan's methodology, based on HMMs, is a significant improvement on the state of the art, and also allows for better uncertainty quantification. Here is what the output can look like, for Good Omens - notice the very large number of switches between the two authors.

Robin Ryder reposted

Gro-Tsen

@gro-tsen.bsky.social

7 Jan

This etymology is wild! #TIL The English word “average”, originally “custom duty” or “loss in transported goods”, comes from the French “avarie” (meaning “damage to a ship or cargo”) from the Italian “avaria” (same meaning), …

Congratulations to Dr Roan Talbut, who successfully defended their PhD on "Tropical Geometry for Phylogenetic Statistics"! It was a pleasure to read the thesis and examine the viva. I learned a lot!

Another contribution is the definition of a Wasserstein distance over these sets of trees, including with different sets of leaves.

The Fréchet mean was computed only a small phylogenies (≤8 leaves). We don't know much yet about the properties of this summary. I'll be interested to see whether it can be used in practice to summarize samples of trees.

Congratulations to Dr Roan Talbut, who successfully defended their PhD on "Tropical Geometry for Phylogenetic Statistics"! It was a pleasure to read the thesis and examine the viva. I learned a lot!

The tropical geometry point of view is a different representation of phylogenetic trees. By considering trees in this space, Roan was able to define a notion of average, which is very different to the summaries we are used to in phylogenetics (consensus trees, MAP, MCC…)

An important contribution of Roan's thesis is to study the properties of the Fréchet mean of trees. They showed that this can be defined, although not always uniquely. They obtain several theoretical results, such as a Law of Large Numbers and a CLT.