UPF Statistics Seminar

Our main seminar series is the UPF Statistics Seminar, organised by Chiara Amorino and Lorenzo Cappello. We also run the Internal AI/Statistics Seminar jointly with the AI and ML group, organized by Amir Esterhuysen.

Unless otherwise noted, seminars take place on Thursdays, 1-2pm, room 20.179, UPF Ciutadella Campus.

Subscribe to the seminar list HERE.
Subscribe to the internal seminar list HERE. 


 

Forthcoming Seminars

Full Schedule 2025–2026

Date Speaker Affiliation Title
23 Oct 2025 Eddie Aamari CNRS, ENS Generative diffusions and minimax estimation
6 Nov 2025 Johannes Schmidt-Hieber University of Twente Statistical theory for biologically inspired learning
13 Nov 2025 Eulàlia Nualart UPF Convergence of continuous-time stochastic gradient descent with applications to deep neural networks
20 Nov 2025 Rianne de Heide University of Twente Bringing Closure to FDR Control
11 Dec 2025 Elena Tuzhilina University of Toronto Efficient Canonical Correlation Analysis with Sparsity
15 Jan 2026 Daniela Witten University of Washington, Seattle Valid F-screening in linear regression
19 Feb 2026 Heather Battey Imperial College Non-standard boundary behaviour in two-component mixture problems
26 Feb 2026 Sergio Bacallado University of Cambridge In-Context Learning for Hierarchical Gaussian Processes: Mechanisms and Theoretical Trade-offs
5 Mar 2026 Domènec Ruiz-Balet Universitat de Barcelona Constructive Conditional Normalizing flows
19 Mar 2026 Elena Manresa Princeton University Adversarial Method of Moments
9 Apr 2026

Cynthia Rush

 Columbia University Is It Easier to Count Communities Than Find Them?
16 Apr 2026 Krzysztof Łatuszyński University of Warwick Stereographic Markov Chain Monte Carlo
20 Apr 2026 Maria Kalli King's College London Network Modeling of Asynchronous Change-Points in Multivariate Time Series
30 Apr 2026 Mathias Drton TU Munich Parameter identification in linear non-Gaussian causal models under general confounding
7 May 2026 Michael Minyi Zhang University of Hong Kong Revisiting Nonstationary Kernel Design for Multi-Output Gaussian Processes
14 May 2026 TBA – slot available   –
21 May 2026 TBA – slot available   –
28 May 2026 Matteo Sfragara University of Padua TBA

 

Past UPF Statistics Seminars

This section lists past talks in the UPF Statistics Seminar (starting from 2015) and selected Internal Statistics Seminars. Click on a year to expand the list.

2025 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
8 May 2025 Sara Wade University of Edinburgh –
24 Apr 2025 Kamelia Daudel ESSEC Business School –
10 Apr 2025 Charlotte Dion-Blanc Sorbonne –
13 Mar 2025 Vincent Rivoirard Université Paris-Dauphine –
27 Feb 2025 Ivan Nourdin University of Luxembourg –
20 Feb 2025 Yaniv Romano Technion –
6 Feb 2025 Florian Krach ETH –
16 Jan 2025 Gleb Smirnov University of Geneva –
2024 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
5 Dec 2024 Stijn Vansteelandt University of Ghent –
28 Nov 2024 Eva Löcherbach Paris 1 –
21 Nov 2024 Domenico Marinucci Università di Roma Tor Vergata –
14 Nov 2024 Aliaksander Hubin University of Oslo –
7 Nov 2024 Alexander Rakhlin MIT –
24 Oct 2024 Alan Gelfand Duke –
16 Oct 2024 Catalina Vallejos University of Edinburgh Catalan Statistics Society Annual Meeting
22 May 2024 Victor Rivero CIMAT Recurrent extensions and Stochastic Differential equations
9 May 2024 Mona Azadkia London School of Economics A Simple Measure of Conditional Dependence
2 May 2024 Stefan Franssen University of Oxford The Bernstein-von Mises theorem for semiparametric mixtures
18 Apr 2024 Johanna Ziegel ETH Zurich Isotonic distributional regression and CRPS decompositions
12 Apr 2024 Sofia Olhede EPFL On Graph Limits as Models for Interaction Data
21 Mar 2024 Sayan Mukherjee Duke University / Max Planck TBC
12 Mar 2024 Federico Castelleti Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Bayesian sample size determination for causal discovery
29 Feb 2024 Zoraida Rico Fernández Columbia University Fine bounds on covariance estimation
22 Feb 2024 Marco Avella Medina Columbia University M-estimation, noisy optimization and user-level local privacy
2023 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
14 Dec 2023 Linbo Wang University of Toronto Sparse Causal Learning: Challenges and Opportunities
16 Nov 2023 Tom Berrett University of Warwick On robustness and local differential privacy
26 Oct 2023 Ezequiel Smucler Glovo Efficient estimators of the average treatment effect under causal graphical models
10 Oct 2023 Mika Meitz University of Helsinki Subgeometrically ergodic autoregressions with autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity
16 May 2023 Stephen G. Walker University of Texas at Austin A new look at Bayesian uncertainty
24 Apr 2023 Aki Nishimura Johns Hopkins University ZZigzag path connects two Monte Carlo paradigms: Hamiltonian counterparts to piecewise deterministic Markov processes
6 Mar 2023 Sonia Petrone Bocconi University Bayesian Prediction-based uncertainty quantification
27 Feb 2023 François-Xavier Briol University College London A robust and scalable approach to Bayesian doubly-intractable problems
20 Feb 2023 Daniele Durante Bocconi University Detective Bayes: Bayesian nonparametric stochastic block modeling of criminal networks
10 Feb 2023 Robin Evans University of Oxford Parametrizing and simulating from Causal Models
26 Jan 2023 Sara Magliacane University of Amsterdam Causality-inspired ML: what can causality do for ML? The domain adaptation case
2022 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
18 May 2022 Davide Viviano UC San Diego Policy design in experiments with (unknown) interference
27 Apr 2022 Chiara Amorino Université du Luxembourg On the rate of estimation for the stationary distribution of stochastic differential equations with and without jumps
5 Apr 2022 Raquel Prado UC Santa Cruz Recent approaches for flexible and efficient analysis of non-stationary time series
4 Apr 2022 Bruno Sansó UC Santa Cruz Geostatistics meets variable selection: multi-scale models for non-stationary spatial fields
9 Mar 2022 Vanessa Didelez Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology & University of Bremen Separable Effects and Causal Estimands
2 Mar 2022 Randal Douc Télécom SudParis Boost your favorite Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler using Kac’s theorem: the Kick-Kac teleportation algorithm
2 Feb 2022 Ale Avalos Pacheco Harvard University & Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cross-study Bayesian Factor Regression in Heterogeneous High-dimensional Data
2021 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
23 Nov 2021 Daniele Durante Bocconi University Advances in Bayesian inference for regression models with binary, categorical and partially-discretized data
12 May 2021 Pier Giovanni Bissiri University of Bologna General Bayesian inference
13 Apr 2021 Piotr Fryźlewicz LSE Narrowest Significance Pursuit: inference for multiple change-points in linear models
2020 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
3 Mar 2020 Armeen Taeb ETH Zurich False discovery control in low-rank estimation
25 Feb 2020 Azadeh Khaleghi Lancaster University Some consistent algorithms for clustering stationary and piece-wise stationary time-series
10 Feb 2020 Michalis Titsias Google DeepMind Functional Regularisation for Continual Learning with Gaussian Processes
2019 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
29 Oct 2019 Heather Battey Imperial College London High-dimensional inference
8 Oct 2019 Javier Rubio Álvarez King’s College London Net survival models: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
1 Oct 2019 Małgorzata Bogdan University of Wrocław Sorted L-One Penalized Estimation
25 Jun 2019 Jack Jewson University of Warwick Generalised Variational Inference
11 Jun 2019 Alessandro Rudi École Normale Supérieure, Paris Scaling up optimal learning methods to large scale learning problems
28 May 2019 Yuhao Wang MIT Learning High-Dimensional Gaussian Graphical Models under Total Positivity without Tuning Parameters
14 May 2019 James Q. Smith University of Warwick Bayesian graphical models of criminal processes
25 Apr 2019 Rajen Shah University of Cambridge RSVP-graphs: Fast High-dimensional Covariance Matrix Estimation Under Latent Confounding
9 Apr 2019 Gabriela Ciołek Télécom ParisTech Concentration inequalities for regenerative and Harris recurrent Markov chains with applications to statistical learning
26 Mar 2019 Alberto Roberto University of Padova Path Weights in Concentration Graphs
5 Mar 2019 Botond Szabó Leiden University Adaptive distributed methods under communication constraints
2018 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
19 Dec 2018 Silvio Lattanzi Google Zurich Online Principal Component Analysis and Column Subset Selection
22 Nov 2018 Christina Goldschmidt University of Oxford Parking on a tree
9 Oct 2018 Judith Rousseau University of Oxford Using asymptotics to understand ABC
20 Mar 2018 Jonas Peters University of Copenhagen Invariant Causal Prediction
15 Mar 2018 Andrea Lodi Polytechnique Montréal On big data, optimization and learning
13 Mar 2018 Benjamin Recht University of California, Berkeley A Dynamical View of Convex Optimization Algorithms
28 Feb 2018 Flavian Vasile Criteo Causal Embeddings for Recommendation
2017 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
30 Nov 2017 Andreas Maurer Grattoni Weak Interactions
16 Nov 2017 Ozan Candogan Chicago Booth Spatial Pricing in Ride-Sharing Networks
10 Nov 2017 Michael Wolf University of Zurich Resurrecting weighted least squares
19 Oct 2017 Ismaël Castillo Université Paris 6 Sparse inference with spike-and-slab posterior distributions
5 Oct 2017 Tolga Tezcan London Business School Proactive customer service: operational and economic analysis
8 Jun 2017 Nicos Savva London Business School Yardstick Competition for Service Systems
25 May 2017 Stéphane Airiau Paris Dauphine Fair and Efficient Randomized Voting
28 Mar 2017 Kayvan Sadeghi University of Cambridge Graphical Models for Exchangeable Random Networks
16 Mar 2017 Manuel Sosa INSEAD Business School Revisiting the role of collaboration in creating breakthrough inventions
9 Mar 2017 Robert Castelo CEXS UPF Covariance decomposition and networked partial correlations
2 Mar 2017 Wilfrid Kendall University of Warwick A Dirichlet Form approach to MCMC Optimal Scaling
16 Feb 2017 Philip Dawid University of Cambridge From Statistical Evidence to Evidence of Causality
31 Jan 2017 Caroline Uhler MIT Learning Bayesian networks based on sparsest permutations
13 Jan 2017 Silvio Lattanzi Google New York Aggregation of noisy information
2016 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
15 Nov 2016 Manuel Gómez Rodríguez Max Planck Institute RedQueen: An Online Algorithm for Smart Broadcasting in Social Networks
6 Oct 2016 Víctor DeMiguel London Business School Firm Characteristics and Stock Returns: An Investment Perspective
9 Jun 2016 Florian Simatos ISAE Delay performance of queue-based CSMA protocol
2 Jun 2016 Lorenzo Rosasco Genoa / MIT Less is more: optimal learning with stochastic projection regularization
25 Feb 2016 Alexandros Karatzoglou Telefónica Research Deep learning
18 Feb 2016 Geoff McLachlan University of Queensland Modelling and Clustering via Mixtures of Multivariate Skew t-Distributions
11 Feb 2016 Ziyun Xu USCEC, California Chinese Interpreting Studies: What makes them do it? a statistical exploration
21 Jan 2016 Steffen Lauritzen University of Copenhagen Linear estimating equations in exponential families with applications for graphical models
2015 – UPF Statistics Seminar
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
26 Nov 2015 Lawrence Murray University of Oxford TBA
19 Nov 2015 Paco Herrera Universidad de Granada Big Data: Technologies and Applications
29 Oct 2015 Mehdi Molkaraie UPF Efficient Monte Carlo Methods for the Ising Model at Low Temperature
8 Oct 2015 Neil Walton University of Manchester Proportional Switching in FIFO Networks
1 Oct 2015 Olivier Winterberger University of Copenhagen Robust and adaptive online learning with BOA algorithm
28 May 2015 Alan Gelfand Duke Spatial data and Gaussian processes: A beautiful marriage
21 May 2015 Rubén Ruiz García Universitat Politècnica de València Simple metaheuristics and state-of-the-art performance for combinatorial optimization: Scheduling with Iterated Greedy Algorithms
14 May 2015 Charalampos Tsourakakis Harvard Algorithm Design for Large-Scale Datasets
25 Mar 2015 Asvin Goel Jacobs University An Optimization-Based International Assessment of Hours of Service Regulations in Road Freight Transport
19 Mar 2015 Vincent Rivoirard Université Paris-Dauphine Lasso Estimation for multivariate Hawkes processes
12 Mar 2015 Nicolas Verzelen INRA Detecting a community in Random Networks
Internal Statistics Seminar (selected past talks)
Date Speaker Affiliation Title
29 May 2025 Yaping Wang UPF –
15 May 2025 Jack Carter UPF –
3 Apr 2025 Elena Bortolato UPF –
13 Feb 2025 Gábor Lugosi UPF –
13 Feb 2023 Jack Jewson UPF Graphical model inference with external network data
20 Feb 2023 Rosemarie Nagel UPF TBC
7 Nov 2022 Simon Briend UPF Archaeology of random recursive dags and Cooper-Frieze random networks
17 Oct 2022 Lorenzo Cappello UPF Variance change point detection with credible sets
9 Nov 2021 Adam Lee UPF Robust and efficient inference for non-regular semiparametric models
5 Oct 2021 Gergely Neu DTIC, UPF Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds for Stochastic Gradient Descent
18 Feb 2020 David Rossell UPF Sparsity and misspecification in L0 and Bayesian model selection
3 Apr 2019 Omiros Papaspiliopoulos UPF Graph-based semi supervised learning
26 Jan 2017 Gábor Lugosi ICREA–UPF & BGSE How to estimate the mean (and how to do regression)?
20 Jan 2017 Víctor Peña Duke University Bayesian Optimization with Shape Constraints
30 Nov 2016 Omiros Papaspiliopoulos ICREA–UPF & BGSE Scalable Bayesian variable selection and model averaging under block orthogonal design
24 Nov 2016 Geert Mesters UPF & BGSE Detecting Granular Time Series in Large Panels
27 Oct 2016 David Rossell UPF & BGSE Scalable robust Bayesian variable selection
29 Sep 2016 Yucheng Sun UPF Detecting Price Jumps in the Presence of Market Microstructure Noise