We organised the first conference of the GdR EcoStat. We spent two lovely days in Lyon talking about ecological statistics with the hundred people who attended. The talks are available here. If you’d like to know more about our activities in the GdR, check out our website.
We held AppliBugs in Montpellier, with the idea to stimulate exchanges and to share information on Bayesian methods and applications ( program here). The day went well despite a rainstorm falling on Montpellier. All talks were great, and I was particularly interested in Adrien Todeschini’s presentation of Biips, a software allowing the implementation of state-space models using particle filtering and a R/BUGS-like syntax.
I attended Daniel Turek’s talk at ISEC about NIMBLE a neat alternative to WinBUGS and JAGS. It is developed by Perry de Valpine’s group at Berkeley and ‘lets you use BUGS models natively in R, program functions that use them, and compile everything via C++ for faster computing’. I played around with NIMBLE a bit, here is an example of fitting a classic capture-recapture model to simulated data - thanks to Perry and Daniel for their help! NIMBLE seems a lot faster than its competitors, and much more flexible. I’ll continue my investigations with more complex models - stay tuned.
The team is leading the organisation of ISEC2014. We’re getting ready by, among many other things, preparing the delegates’ packs. Of course, these efforts cannot go without some relaxing time.
Below are the slides of my plenary talk at the 2013 EURING meeting on individual variability in capture-recapture models. I couldn’t attend, but the organizers were kind enough to run my presentation to the audience. I had to be a bit imaginative for the attendees not to fall asleep…