Fireside chat about probabilistic programming in Clojure
Details
** To join this meeting, please contact the organizers in person. **
Probabilistic programming is one of the promising and refreshing approaches to probabilistic modelling and to artificial intelligence nowadays.
It is a fascinating field, lying in the intersection of programming language theory, compilation, probability and Bayesian statistics. It calls us to put aside our usual programmer mind, and be open to new ways of thinking (in a sense, thinking backwards).
On this meetup, we will meet David Tolpin -- the person who wrote most of Anglican -- a probabilistic programming language written in Clojure.
Together, we will have a broad discussion of the current state of probabilistic programming in Clojure and in other languages,
On the regular meetings of our Clojure Data Science Course, we will later look again into Anglican, and have some demonstrations of its usage.
Please note that this is an advanced meeting. We assume that you have at least some knowledge in probability theory (e.g., the notion of conditional probability and Bayes rule), and that you have some interest in programming languages.
Also, before the meeting, please read at least these two chapters of
"Probabilistic Models of Cognition" by Noah D. Goodman, Joshua B. Tenenbaum & The ProbMods Contributors.
http://probmods.org/chapters/generative-models.html
http://probmods.org/chapters/conditioning.html
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Links:
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Anglican -- https://probprog.github.io/anglican/
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David Tolpin -- http://dtolpin.github.io/about/
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Clojure Data Science Course -- https://clojure-data-science-course.github.io/pages-output/about/
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Draft of an upcoming book about probabilistic programming (by Jan-Willem van de Meent, Brooks Paige, Hongseok Yang and Frank Wood) -- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.10756.pdf
Fireside chat about probabilistic programming in Clojure