On October 7 I raised the possibility of organising a BUGS workshop.  To
date I have received about 25 favourable replies, some individuals, some
representing groups of      statisticians and others from the US whom I
assume will not attend a meeting in the UK.  I believe there is enough
interest to proceed with organising such a meeting, especially as there
is likely to be others outside the BUGS mailing list who would be also
interested.

I have provisionally booked Errol St. (RSS HQ in London) for Thursday
June 24.
Both David Spiegelhalter and Nicky Best have agreed to take part.
     
My suggested working title for this meeting is "Practical Bayes using
BUGS".
Personally I would wish this workshop to be predominantly about
practical application issues.  Examples might include:
     
     How to use DOODLEBUGS (advantages?)
     
     Assessing convergence
     
     Model validation
     
     Specifying "weak" priors in "non-standard" but reasonably common 
     situations
     
     Understanding error messages, common mistakes, FAQ's, "tricks &
tips"
     
     Practical issues with non log-concave distributions (?)
     
     Effect & implications of different parameterisations - good & bad 
     practice
     
     Some specific issues that were raised: multinomial probit models,
BMA
     
Some of these issues could be discussed via poster presentations.

My current thoughts on the format of the meeting are to base the day
around 4,say, breakout small discussion groups - each on a specific
topic.  Each group then presents back to the whole in the afternoon;
these "presentations" could take many forms: problems posed and
tentative solutions offered for discussion, good/bad egs shared, "cries
for help", ...  Concurrent with this could be the poster presentations.
It would be nice to finish the day with a brief talk on future BUGS
developments.
     
We could also use the day to obtain feedback on the additional BUGS
features that users would like, and current features not liked.
Alternatively this could be the main focus of the day.
     
The meeting will be advertised in RSS News and allstat March/April next
year.
     
If you have any comments on my proposals, or suggestions for wider
advertising I would very much welcome them.  It would be particularly
useful to receive "votes", from likely attendees, on which topics are of
interest and whether the proposed format is appropriate (alternative
suggestions are encouraged).  Also, if you wish to offer a poster
presentation please forward me a synopsis, preferably by end of February
'99.

To avoid general annoyance, please reply direct to me and not the
mailing list.  I will update the list on progress early in the new year.

Regards

Phil




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