Virtual Symposium on Directional Statistics (VSDS)

The Virtual Symposium on Directional Statistics (VSDS) is a small-size workshop that is organized in a light-weight fully online manner. It serves the exchange between researchers on directional statistics without publication requirements and comes at zero costs. Talks are given by researchers known in the community and by other experts (subject to a quality assessment by the committee). It is open for listener participation for everybody else, such as beginners in the field or users of the methods working in companies.

The first VSDS is dedicated to Kanti Mardia. The conference is held on November 9, 2020.

Attending VSDS 2020

VSDS is held fully online on Zoom, is free of charge, and does not require registration. Everybody who has declared interest before has received a link to join directly. If you want to join without getting in touch with us, you can obtain the passcode by using a calculator (or a sheet of paper) to determine the result of the product 17*109*479 (this is a measure to prevent bots from bombing the meeting). Using this code, you can join by entering the Meeting ID 612 7669 9079 in your zoom client or using this link https://kit-lecture.zoom.us/j/61276699079. The Zoom room opens one week before the meeting so you are free to try out if it works for you ahead of time. If you have any inquiries, contact pfaff∂kit.edu.

 

Program VSDS 2020

The detailed program is available at https://rebrand.ly/vsds-schedule.

  • Opening and Introductions
  • Kanti Mardia: Reflections on Directional Statistics https://youtu.be/o-SuxuXnL9Q
  • Thomas Hamelryck: Deep Probabilistic Programming and the Protein Folding Problem
  • Christophe Ley: Sine-Skewed Distributions for Protein Angles https://youtu.be/TIYNQzPpmuo
  • Ola Rønning: Einstein VI: General and Integrated Stein Variational Inference in NumPyro https://youtu.be/9DGUoEv3nUA
  • Kailai Li: Rigid Body Motion Estimation Based on Directional Statistics https://youtu.be/hxT33qHFc2Y
  • Paula Saavedra-Nieves: Nonparametric Estimation of Directional Highest Density Regions https://youtu.be/kAiFgrhXTME
  • Najmeh Nakhaei Rad: Generalized Skew-Symmetric Distributions on the Torus
  • Florian Pfaff: Recursive Bayesian Estimation on Periodic Manifolds Based on Grids https://youtu.be/IqDuFGcCUHs
  • Open Discussion: Cooperation Opportunities, future meetings