LessWrong meetup, Tuesday, Dec. 30

[Joshua Fox]

We're having a meetup next week!

• When: Tuesday, December 30 at 19:00
  
• Where: Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv. Meet at 29th floor; we'll then move to a room. 
  
• Contact: If you can't find us,  call Anatoly, who is graciously hosting us, at 054-245-1060; or me at 054-569-1165.
  
• Facebook: Event listing. Please RSVP if you have FB, to help us get a sense of how big a room we need.
  

Meeting and Probabilistic Programming talk 

Eli Sennesh will be speaking on Probabilistic Programming, and we'll have the usual chance to chat with other interesting people.

What is probabilistic programming? By analogy: if functional programming is programming with first-class functions and equational reasoning, probabilistic programming is programming with first-class distributions and Bayesian inference. All computable probability distributions can be encoded as probabilistic programs, and every probabilistic program represents a probability distribution.

What does it do? It gives a concise language for specifying complex, structured statistical models, and abstracts over the implementation details of exact and approximate inference algorithms. These models can be networked, causal, hierarchical, recursive, anything: the graph structure of the program is the generative structure of the distribution.

Who's interested? Cognitive scientists, statisticians, machine-learning specialists, and artificial-intelligence researchers. 

PREREQUISITES: Know what Scheme/Lisp is, have previously heard of Bayes' Theorem and Bayesian reasoning. No calculations will be necessary during the presentation.