Friday marked the closing session of the 27th International Workshop on Bayesian and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering (MaxEnt 2007). I had the great pleasure to host this year’s meeting in the lovely city of Saratoga Springs. We had approximately 100 participants from almost 25 countries spanning all six of the populated continents!
This year marked the 50th anniversary of Ed Jaynes’ ground-breaking 1957 paper “Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics” where he introduces the idea that Statistical Mechanics is an Inferential Theory. This paper led to the concept of Maximum Entropy, which is used to assign priors in Bayesian Probability Theory, but also, was shown by Adom Giffin at this meeting to be consistent with Bayesian learning.
I was very pleased to have had a distinguished array of invited speakers including: Shun-ichi Amari (RIKEN, JAPAN), Jose M. Bernardo (Universitat de Valencia, SPAIN), Tony Bell (Redwood Neuroscience Institute, USA), Philip Goyal (Perimeter Institute, CANADA), Phil Gregory (University of British Columbia, CANADA), and Stephen Roberts (Oxford, UK). I will blog over the next few days about some of the ideas that were presented at this meeting.
I also was extremely pleased with the Tutorials, which were presented by John Skilling, Jose Bernardo, Ariel Caticha, Carlos Rodriguez, and myself. They dealt heavily with the foundations of probability theory and connected heavily with information theory, geometry, and order theory. Rather than being traditional tutorials, he majority of these talk presented new ideas and new results!
Every year the MaxEnt meeting takes on its own personality. In 2005 in San Jose, the focus was on sampling methods, and I was pleased to have John Skilling’s contribution on Nested Sampling in my volume. This year, the focus was on the Foundations of Probability Theory, Information Geometry, Entropy and Bayes, Lattices and Measures, Levels and Loops, Information and Physics, and Quantum Mechanics. The 2007 Proceedings Volume will contain a large number of cutting-edge papers on these exciting topics. The collective atmosphere of the meeting seemed to indicate that this community is close to making some exciting breakthroughs.
Many of us at the meeting, myself included, were extremely disappointed by the fact that some individuals were unable to attend due to visa problems. One such individual, who has been prominent in our community, was denied entry due to the fact that he had a dual French-Iranian citizenship. These policies enacted by our politicians are as damaging to the scientific community and the advances that we work to provide for humanity, as they are to the individuals and their well-being. It is high time that our nations stop acting like children.
Next year, MaxEnt 2008 will be hosted by Julio M. Stern on the beaches near Sao Paolo BRAZIL. MaxEnt 2009 will be hosted by Paul Goggans in University, Mississippi USA, and MaxEnt 2010 will be held in Grenoble FRANCE.
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
Posted under Mathematics, Philosophy, Physics, Probability, Research
This post was written by drknuth on July 14, 2007
Do you have any idea when the proceedings of MaxEnt 2007 will be available? Thanks a lot.
The proceedings are currently with the publisher and we expect them to be published in December.
Thanks,
Kevin