Overview
The first BUC workshop took place in CIMAT, Guanajuato, Mexico in the week beginning Monday 9th November 2015. A team of two academics, one PDRA and 4 PhD students from the University of Bath travelled to CIMAT to deliver a short-course, `When populations and hazards collide: modelling exposures and health risks’ presented by Gavin Shaddick (Bath) and Jim Zidek (UBC). The short-course was the first in a series of three on Big Data and Statistics in Environmental Research which are listed as BUC-I, BUC-II and BUC-III in the workshop series.
The course provides an introduction to modelling exposures to hazardous processes and epidemiological analyses where data has structure both over space and time. It covers methods for spatio-temporal analysis and the practical application of methods and will cover both theory and applied examples. The latter will be dealt with specifically through practical ‘hands-on’ computer sessions in which participants will be guided through the analyses of real life examples of data with both temporal and spatial structure.
Attached to the workshop an additional PhD conference was held with talks from young researchers at Bath, UNAM and CIMAT. The BUC executive also took the occasion to meet for the first time and plan the future of the BUC series. BUC-I was a great success with over thirty students and staff attending the short-course and twelve PhD students presenting their research during the conference.
The PhD conference
Within the conference held on the 11th November, four students from CIMAT and 5 from Bath presented their research. Sessions were chaired by students from CIMAT. The conference was well attended, with nearly fifty people in the audience over the day. The conference was followed by a social engagement at a local Taco restaurant. The programme was as follows:
Session 1
Chair: Abel Palafox.
| 12:30-13:00 | Matthew Thomas (Bath) | Global modelling of air pollution using multiple data sources |
| 13:00-13:30 | Mario Santana-Cibiran (CIMAT) | Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in high level representation in the PDE Impedance Imaging inverse problem |
| 13:30-14:00 | Dorottya Fekete (Bath) | Compensated fragmentations and related problems |
Session 2
| 15:00-15:30 | Sandra Palau (CIMAT) | Stochastic differential equations with jumps applied to branching processes |
| 15:30-16:00 | Bati Sengul (Bath) | Cutoff for conjugacy-invariant random walks on the permutation group |
| 16:00-16:30 | Weerapat Satitkanitkul (Bath) | Conditioned self-similar Markov processes |
Session 3
| 17:00-17:30 | Abel Palafox (CIMAT) | A cloud of points approach for Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification in the PDE scattering inverse problem |
| 17:30-18:00 | Horacio González Duhart Muñoz de Cote (Bath) | The semi-infinite TASEP: Large Deviations via Matrix Products |
| 18:00-18:30 | Carolina Euan Campos | Detection of Changes in Time Series: A Frequency Domain Approach |
The course
The short course comprised of a series of lectures and practical, hands-on, computer labs. Lectures were delivered by Gavin Shaddick (Bath) and Jim Zidek (UBC). SAMBa students Dorka Fekete and Matt Thomas were heavily involved in the successful delivery of the course. In addition to preparing much of the material, they ran the software training labs. They were kept very busy, with thirty-two students and staff attending the course and labs in the first two days and over 15 staying for an optional lab on Saturday morning. Both Dorka and Matt found the experience beneficial:
"Experiencing how to train others in using statistical techniques was a really invaluable experience and will be beneficial to me as I continue my own research in statistics." (Matthew Thomas)
“My research is in fundamental probability theory but I was able to put the statistics training that SAMBa has given me to good use at the workshop. It was very rewarding to give students in Mexico the tools to carry out new research." (Dorka Fekete)
The timetable for the course was as follows.
Thursday (November 12):
| 09:30-10:00 | Introduction |
| 10:00-11:15 | The need for spatio-temporal modelling |
| 11:15-11:30 | Break |
| 11:30-13:00 | Spatial lattice processes and applications |
| 13:00-15:30 | Lunch |
| 15:30-17:00 | Computer labs |
Friday (November 13):
| 09:30-10:30 | Point referenced spatial processes |
| 11:00-11:30 | Break |
| 11:30-13:00 | Point referenced spatial processes (cont.) and applications |
| 13:00-15:30 | Lunch |
| 15:30-17:00 | Spatio-temporal processes |
Saturday (November 13):
| 9:30-11:00 | Computer labs |
| 11:00-12:00 | Wind up |
Further details
Further details of the short-course can be found at:
Detailed material from the course, lab sessions, data and code can be found at:
http://www.stat.ubc.ca/~gavin/STEPIBookNewStyle/course_cimat.html
Participants
Andreas Kyprianou
Jim Zidek
Gavin Shaddick
Bati Sengul
Horacio González Duhart Muñoz de Cote
Carlos Dias (CD)
Victor Rivero
Victor Perez Abreu
Juan Carlos Pardo
Andres Christen
Mario Santana-Cibiran
Sandra Palau
Abel Palafox
Carolina Euan Campos
Adolphus Wagala
Jose Angel Sanchez Gomez
Lilia Guadalupe López Renteria
René Eloy Mendoza Franco
Abelardo Montesinos López
Carolina de Jesus Euan Campos.
Carolina Gonzalez Gonzalez
Cesar De alba Flores
Desireé Fernanda Soto Galindo
Eduardo Alvarez Rodríguez
Georges Bucyibaruta
Ilce Anahi Medina Mendoza
Israel Martínez Hernández
Juan Martín Barrios
Julián Suárez
Pedro Orozco Del Pino
Roberto Bárcenas Curtis
Dorottya Fekete
Matthew Thomas
Weerapat Satitkanitkul