Events

Below is a list of selected events I will be or was involved in, in one way or another :-)

Forthcoming

• Organiser (with Florence d’Alché-Buc, Judith Rousseau and Richard Wilkinson) of the programme Representing, calibrating & leveraging prediction uncertainty from statistics to machine learning to be held from May 6th to August 29th 2025 at Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK.

• Invited talk at the Computational Statistics and Machine Learning seminar series, UCL AI Center, London, UK, May 2.

Past events from the current decade (still filling some gaps)

2025

• Organizer (with Mihai Anitescu, Fred Hickernell, Shiwei Lan, Daniel Sanz-Alonso, and Dave Woods) of the workshop Kernel Methods in Uncertainty Quantification and Experimental Design that took place from March 31 to April 4, 2025 at the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation, Chicago, USA.

• Invited talk at the Computational Mathematics + X Lunch Seminars, Caltech, USA, March 25.

• Invited talk at the AI in chemistry and beyond: Trends in the field Seminar, EPFL (online), March 18.

2024

• Visit, talk and crash-course of Geir Evensen at UniBE, Bern, December 11-13.

• Invited speaker at the Gaussian Process Summer School 2024 (GPSS, Manchester, UK, September 9-12, 2024).

• IMSV summer workshop, Bern, July 1-2.

• Keynote speaker at the 15th International Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications (GeoEnv 2024, Chania, Greece, June 19-21, 2024).

• Invited speaker at the Practical Data Assimilation and Uncertainty Quantification Workshop (PAUQ, Orleans, France, May 21-23, 2024).

• Conference co-chair (with Guillaume Obozinski) of Data Science for the Sciences (Bern, April 11-12, 2024).

• Invited talk in the mini-symposium Challenges in Inversion and Model Calibration: From UQ to OED - Part I of III at the SIAM Conference on UNcertainty Quantification, Trieste, Italy, February 27 - March 1.

2023

• Short (too short) participation on July 17 in the Cambridge Ellis Unit Summer School on Probabilistic Machine Learning 2023

• After a four years gap, glad to be at mODa13 in Southampton from July 9 to 14.

• Lifting Inference with Kernel Embeddings took place in Bern from June 26 to 30.

• Congratulations to Cédric Travelletti on his successful PhD defense on June 2!

• Congratulations to Athénaïs Gautier on her successful PhD defense on May 19!

• Swiss Statistics Seminar at Bern on March 23.

• Invited talk to the INPUT Research meeting on February 3.

• Data Science Seminar at London School of Economics on January 30.

• The first Bern Data Science Symposium took place in Bern on January 25. Thanks to our great speakers Prof. Caroline Uhler (MIT) and Prof. Amir Zamir (EPFL)!

2022

• Invited talk to the Machine Learning and Dynamical Systems Seminar, online, December 15.

• Patric Wyss successfully defended his PhD thesis (co-supervision with Dr. Ahmed Abdulkadir) at Universitäre Psychiatrische Dienste (UPD), November 22.

• Visit of Dr. Krikamol Muandet around his talk at Biased Data, Models, and Algorithms. Perspectives from Data Science, November 1.

• Invited talk (delivered online) at the inaugural meeting of the Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique UQ@Paris-Saclay, October 18.

• Rapporteur on the PhD thesis of Louis Berry, who successfully defended his PhD (Toulouse/Cadarache) on September 28.

• Rapporteur on the PhD thesis of Sébastien Petit, who successfully defended his PhD (Université Paris-Saclay) on September 2.

• Visit of Prof. Peter Frazier (Cornell University, USA) at IMSV on July 11-12.

• External examiner on the PhD committee of Manuel Schürch, who successfully defended his PhD at IDSIA Lugano on July 1st.

• Scientific committee member of the Bern Data Science Day, Bern, May 6.

• Co-organizer (with Athénaïs Gautier and Simon Mak) of the mini-symposia “Incorporating Structural Information in Kernel Methods” (Part I and Part II) at the SIAM conference on Uncertainty Quantification (UQ22), which took place in Atlanta (USA) and online from April 12 to 15.

• Chair of Lifting Inference with Kernel Embeddings, online, January-14.

2021

• Chairing the online workshop Accelerated statistical inference for the sciences, September 6-7.

• I was on the PhD committee of Christian Agrell, who successfully defended his PhD of the University of Olso (online) on August 27.

• Invited talk at Mascotnum 2021, online, April 28-30.

• Scientific committee member of the Bern Data Science Day, Bern, April 23.

• Invited talk at the mini-symposium Bayesian Methods in Science and Engineering - Part II withing the SIAM (virtual) conference on Computational Science and Engineering, March 4.

• Invited talk at the Computer Vision Group’s seminar, Bern (online), Feburary 25.

• Invited talk at Caltech’s CM+X seminar, Pasadena (online), January 27.

Selected events from the last decade and before

• Invited talk, Swiss Data Science Center at ETH Zürich (Switzerland), March 3 2020.

• Invited talk, Mathematical Colloquium at Karlsruhe Intitute of Technology, Germany, November 4 2019.

• Invited talk, Symposium Data Science for the Natural Sciences, University of Zürich (Switzerland), August 28th, 2019.

• Invited talk at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of Vienna (Austria), April 2019, 2019.

• Invited talk at the Mathematics Department, University of Luxembourg, March 28 2019.

• Thursday September 19, 2019: Start of the Spatial Statistics course I taught at EPFL

• Our project partner Prof. Wolfgang Polonik gave a deep crash-course at Idiap on Topological Data Analysis on July 17th, 2019

• Co-chair J.M. Azaïs, University of Toulouse) of MS181 “Integral and algebraic geometric methods in the study of Gaussian random fields” that took place on July 11 2019 within the SIAM conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry, Bern, Switzerland.

• Organizer of MS61 “Statistical machine learning for inversion and optimization under data and model heterogeneities” that took place on July 8 2019 within the Applied Inverse Problems conference, Grenoble, France.

• Invited talk at the Uncertainty Quantification, Machine Learning & Bayesian Statistics in Scientific Computing workshop, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany, from July 1. to 5. 2019.

• Participation in the Model-Oriented Data Analysis and Optimum Design (mODa) Workshop, Smolenice Castle, Slovakia, from June 23. to 28. 2019.

• Thanks to financial and organizational support from the Swiss Mathematical Society and Idiap, we had the great pleasure to welcome Prof. Gabriel Peyré for a public lecture and a crash-course on Optimal Transport for Machine Learning at Idiap, February 12.-13. 2019.

• Invited seminar at Meteoswiss, Kloten, CH, October 30 2018.

• Keynote at the Swiss Geocomputing Centre kick-off workshop at University of Lausanne, CH, 15 October 2018.

• Invited talk at the Advances in Kernel Methods workshop (closing the GPUQ summer school) at the University of Sheffield, UK, 6 September 2018.

• Invited talk at the Gaussian Process and Uncertainty Quantification Summer School at the University of Sheffield, UK, 5 September 2018.

• Invited talk at the Statistics Seminar of the Department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University, Milano, IT, 14 June 2018.

• Invited talk at the UQ for inverse problems in complex systems workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK, 9-13 April 2018.

• Invited talk at the Surrogate models for UQ in complex systems workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK, 5-9 February 2018.

• Invited talk at the CRISM Seminar, Warwick University, Coventry, UK, January 19 2018.

• Invited talk at the Key UQ methodologies and motivating applications workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK, 8-12 January 2018.

• Invited participant in the Isaac Newton Institute programme Uncertainty quantification for complex systems: theory and methodologies at Cambridge, UK (stay for several weeks distributed over January-February and April 2018).

• Invited talk at NIPS workshop on Bayesian optimization for science and engineering, December 9. 2017

• Co-organizer of the Valais/Wallis Workshop on Artificial Intelligence 2 at Idiap, November 10. 2017.

• Invited speaker at the Trondheim Symposium in Statistics 2017, and visiting Prof. Jo Eidsvik, NTNU Trondheim and Baardshaug, Norway, 4-7 October 2017.

• Invited talk and visit of Dr. Adam Amara and Prof. Alexandre Refregier at Alexandre Refregier’s Cosmology Research Group, Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, 4-5 September 2017.

• Invited talk (session on statistical methods for high-dimensional computer experiments) at the 61st World Statistics Congress - ISI2017, Marrakech, July 2017.

• Kick-off meeting of the summer of GPs at Idiap, June 28. 2017.

• Plenary invited talk (session on Stochastic programming and Optimization) at the Bayesian Inference in Stochastic Processes (BISP-10) workshop, Milano, June 2017.

• PhD defense of Dario Azzimonti at the University of Bern, November 17th 2016.

• Invited talk at the Gaussian Process and Uncertainty Quantification Summer School, Sheffield, September 2016.

• Participation in the 11th Model-Oriented Data Analysis and Optimum Design (MODA) Workshop, Hamminkeln-Dingden, Germany, from June 12. to 17. 2016.

• Co-organizer (with Dario Azzimonti and Ilya Molchanov) of the Random Sets in Action (Estimation of sets, shapes and geometric features) workshop, Bern, June 2016.

• Invited talk and academic visit of Prof. Spodarev at the University of Ulm, April 2016.

• Co-organizer with Xu He and Jeff Wu of the Mini-Symposium “Design of Computer Experiments and Sequential Strategies with Gaussian Process Models” (Parts I, II and III and with Bruno Sudret of the Mini-Symposium “Gaussian Processes: Feature Extraction vs Sensitivity Analysis” (Parts I and II) at the SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification (UQ16), Lausanne, April 2016.

• Invited talk at the Mathematics seminar of New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE, December 15 2015.

• PhD defense of Mickael Binois, Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, December 3 2015.

• Invited talk at the 1st PlanetS workshop on Bayesian Statistics, University of Bern, November 26 2015.

• Invited talk at the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, University of Lausanne, September 30 2015.

• Invited talks at the Gaussian Process Summer School and the Workshop on Gaussian Processes for Global Optimization, Sheffield, September 14-17 2015.

• Invited talk at IMS China (session on Statistics for Geometric Features), Kunming, July 1-4 2015.

• Participant to the 47èmes Journées de Statistique de la SFdS, Lille, June 1-5 2015.

• Program Committee member of the Mascot Num Conference, Mines Saint-Etienne, April 8-10 2015.

• Seminar talk at Stanford University Jef Caers’ team, December 2014.

• Invited talk to the Statistics Seminar, University of California at Davis, December 2014.

• Invited seminar at Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, November 28 2014.

• Co-chair of the GRF-Sim Workshop (Simulation of Gaussian and related random fields), hosted by the University of Bern, November 24-26 2014.

• Invited talk to the The French Aerospace Lab (ONERA), Toulouse, November 12-13 2014.

• Venia docendi (habilitation) trial lecture, Faculty of Science of the University of Bern, November 6th 2014.

• Invited talk to the Joint Seminar of Numerical Anaylsis / Statistics, EPFL, October 17th 2014.

• Scientific programme committee member for the UCM 2014 Conference, Sheffield, July 28-30 2014.

• Invited talk, Session on “Geometric methods in statistics”, 2nd Meeting of the International Society for Nonparametric Statistics, Cadiz, June 2014.

• Co-organizer (with prof. Bruno Sudret) of the MascotNum Workshop on Computer Experiments and Meta-models for Uncertainty Quantification, ETH Zurich, April 23-25 2014.

• Invited contribution to the session “Talks in honour of Ilya M. Sobol’ “ of the Eleventh International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing, KU Leuven, April 6-11 2014.

• Invited talk, Joint Statistics and Scientific Computation Seminar, University of Nottingham, February 2014.

• Invited talk at the MAD seminar, Toulouse School of Economics, November 15 2013.

• PhD defense of Clément Chevalier, University of Bern, September 18 2013.

• Invited talk at the Séminaire de Statistique, Institut de Mathematique de Toulouse, September 10 2013.

• Participation in the 15th Annual Conference of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences, Madrid, September 2-6 2013.

• Participation in the 7th International Conference on Sensitivity Analysis of Model Output (“MASCOT-SAMO 2013”), Nizza, July 1-4 2013. Guest editor (with Bertrand Iooss and Luc Pronzato) of a special issue of Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation following this conference.

• Participation in the 10th Model-Oriented Data Analysis and Optimum Design (mODa) workshop, Lagow Lubuski, Poland, from June 10 to 14 2013.

• Invited talk to the “ZüKoSt” Seminar on Applied Statistics, ETH Zürich (Switzerland), April 25 2013.

• Invited talk at the Ecole-chercheur “Analyse de sensibilité, propagation d’incertitudes et exploration numérique de modèles en sciences de l’environnement”, Ecole de Physique des Houches, from April 7 to 13 2013.

• Program committee member and contributor to the NIPS 2012 Workshop on Bayesian Optimization and Decision Making in Lake Tahoe, December 7 2012.

• Invited talk at the Seminar of the School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, November 19 2012.

• Contributed talk at the 8th World Congress in Probability and Statistics in Istanbul (Turkey), from July 9 to 14 2012.

• Invited speaker at the Uncertainty in Computer Models 2012 conference (UCM 2012) in Sheffield (UK), from July 2 to 4 2012.

• Presentation at The 9th International Geostatistics Congress in Oslo (NO), from June 11 to 15 2012.

• Research visit and invited talk at the TU Dortmund (invitation by PD. Dr. Sonja Kuhnt) from April 23 to 26 2012.

• Invited talk (session ES28) at the 4th International Conference on Computing and Statistics ERCIM’11 in London, December 17-19 2011.

• Invited talk at the Séminaire “Mathématiques et Société” in Neuchâtel, on December 14 2011.

• Inaugural meeting of the ReDICE project in Paris, December 6 2011.

• An Introduction to Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces, II at the University of Bern on November 16. 2011.

• Ph.D. defense of Nicolas Durrande at the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, November 9 2011. Title: “Étude de classes de noyaux adapés à la simplification et à l’interprétation des modèles d’approximation. Une approche fonctionnelle et probabiliste”

• An Introduction to Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces, I at the University of Bern on November 2 2011.

• Seminar talk about Customizing Kernels at the University of Bern on September 28 2011.

• Participant in a workshop on High-Dimensional Problems in Statistics at ETH Zürich, September 19-23 2011.

• Beginning of the course on Spatial Statistics (together with D. Schuhmacher) in Bern on September 19 2011.

• Invited talk at the Operations Research seminar in Tilburg (NL) on September 15 2011.

• Workshop participant (INI-supported) in Accelerating industrial productivity via deterministic computer experiments & stochastic simulation at the Isaac Newton Institute (Cambridge, UK), September 3-9 2011.

• Invited talk (and research week with T. Espinasse, F. Gamboa, and M.L. Stein) at the Costa Brava project meeting “New Trends in Kriging” in Toulouse (France), June 24-30 2011.

• Two-part invited talk (with Victor Picheny) at the Optimisation et évaluation d’événements rares workshop, ENSCP, Paris (France), Mai 4 2010.

• Invited talk at the Institut für Spanende Fertigung, TU Dortmund (Germany), January 25 2010.

• Invited talk at the Autumn Symposium of the Statistical Modelling Research Training Group, Universitätskolleg Haus Bommerholz, Germany, November 20-21 2009.

• Co-organizer of a the ENBIS-EMSE conference, Saint-Etienne, France, 1-3 July 2009.

• Invited talk to the “Uncertainty, Metamodels, and Design of Experiments” (IMPEC) Seminar, CEA Saclay (France), October 6 2009.

• Invited talk to the Séminaire Mathématiques et Société, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland, March 4 2009.

• Two contributed talks at the Congrès conjoint de la Société Statistique du Canada et de la SFdS, Ottawa (Canada), May 25-29 2008.

• Invited talk at the 7th Workshop on Quality Improvement Methods, Universitätskolleg Haus Bommerholz, Witten-Bommerholz, Germany, May 23-24, 2008.

• Invited talk at INRIA, Sequel (Optimization, Learning and Statistical Methods) team, March 14th, 2008, Lille (France).

• Invited talk in Philippe Renard’s stochastic hydrogeology group, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, May 3 2007.

• Contributed talk at the NCP07 conference (Non Convex Programming International Conference: Local and Global Approaches), Rouen (France), December 17-21 2007.

• Contributed talk at the ENBIS7 conference, Dortmund (Germany), September 24-26 2007.

• Contributed talk at the Joint ENBIS-DEINDE conference, Torino (Italy), April 11-13 2007.