Combinatorial Stochastic Processes

A conference in celebration of Jim Pitman's work

U.C. San Diego, June 20-21 2014

Jim Pitman's career research has encompassed many topics within Probability Theory: Markov chains, Brownian motion and related diffusions (in extensive joint work with Marc Yor) and the field of Combinatorial Stochastic Processes initiated in his 2002 St Flour lectures. Within this field lie topics such as exchangeable and partially exchangeable random partitions, the two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet distribution, Markovian and exchangeable coalescents, real-tree valued processes, stochastic fragmentation models, occupancy problems and power laws for random discrete distributions, Bayes priors for statistics over combinatorial structures. The conference will emphasize topics that testify to the continuing influence of Jim's work.

Here is the conference photograph courtesy of Chris Burdzy and here are the names of the people, left-to-right.

This page provides a record of the talks at the conference, with links to slides for most talks..

Invited talks

Jean Bertoin (University of Zurich) : Compensated fragmentations.

Krzysztof Burdzy (University of Washington): On the meteor process.

Sasha Gnedin (Queen Mary, University of London): Random permutations and the two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet distribution.

Christina Goldschmidt (Oxford) : A line-breaking construction of the stable trees.

Priscilla (Cindy) Greenwood (UBC Vancouver): Genesis of gamma bursts in neural local field potentials.

Lancelot F. James (HKUST): Stick-breaking Priors: The Pitman-Yor Process and Randomized Generalized Gamma Models.

Grégory Miermont (Paris-Sud): The scaling limit of uniform random maps, via the Ambjorn-Budd bijection. Paper.

Soumik Pal (University of Washington): Spectral dynamics of random regular graphs and the Poisson free field.

Short talks by junior researchers

Sayan Banerjee: On maximal Markovian couplings.

Geronimo Uribe Bravo: Shifting processes with cyclically exchangeable increments at random.

Tamara Broderick: Feature allocations, probability functions, and paintboxes.

Harry Crane: Exchangeable graph-valued processes.

Stephen DeSalvo: Poisson approximation and Stein's method for the asymptotic enumeration of combinatorial sequences.

Noah Forman : The quantile transform of Brownian motion.

Dan Lanoue : The metric coalescent.

Douglas Rizzolo : Pattern avoiding permutations and Brownian excursion.

Andrey Sarantsev : Triple collisions of competing Brownian particles.

Wenpin Tang : Patterns in random walks and in Brownian paths.

Maciej Zieba: Various applications of restricted Boltzmann machines for bad quality training data.

Sponsors

Financial support from the National Science Foundation and from the Charles Lee Powell foundation is gratefully acknowledged.