Michael Betancourt will be speaking at Google and at the University of California, Berkeley. The Google talk is closed to outsiders (but if you work at Google, you should go!); the Berkeley talk is open to all:
Friday March 22, 12:10 pm, Evans Hall 1011.
Title of talk: Stan: Practical Bayesian Inference with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
Abstract: Practical implementations of Bayesian inference are often limited to approximation methods that only slowly explore the posterior distribution. By taking advantage of the curvature of the posterior, however, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) efficiently explores even the most highly contorted distributions. In this talk I will review the foundations of and recent developments within HMC, concluding with a discussion of Stan, a powerful inference engine that utilizes HMC, automatic differentiation, and adaptive methods to minimize user input.
This is cool stuff. And he’ll be showing the whirlpool movie!
I will be at the Berkeley one if I can. Stan is great!
I think software has made it to major league when you get invited to talk about it at google! :) Congratulations.
If it is a TechTalk we will probably be lucky to be able to watch a video online in a few days.
Haha, no, nothing quite as prestigious, but we’re still honored. In particular, I don’t think there will be any video.
I attended this talk at UCLA earlier this month, and truly enjoyed it. Michael is very knowledgeable and a great speaker. I hope a video can be made available, because it makes a good resource to get started with HMC and Stan.
Thanks, Jeroen! In response to the comments from the UCLA talk I’ve added more content to the talk, including a full demo of the modeling language and the compilation/execution process. Should be good.
If a video would become available please link to it.
I agree. A video with an overview of Stan would be really great.
Great talk! Thanks so much