Thursday Open Discussion

This discussion was moderated by Lou Billera. Billera noted that, as it was the final discussion session, anything is a valid topic today. The discussion started off with some comments about the usefulness of the workshop:

Q. Concatenation as ``averaging''?

Q. Likelihood contours?

Q. Multivariate "metrics"?

Q. Alternate representations (not trees)?

Q. Random walks on trees (generate letters, prodcue new trees)

Q. Would it be useful to study 2-colored trees to model orthology and paralogy? (Shareshian)


During the session, Diaconis suggested that, as a follow up to this conference, people can now get together in small groups and communicate and start to work on a problem, whereas this wasn't true before the beginning of the week. AIM could facilitate such follow-up meetings.

There was some brief discussion about holding a follow-up conference to this one, since all the participants now have a solid foundation on which to try to work on some joint problems.


ARCC and the organizers (Lou Billera, Susan Holmes, Karen Vogtmann) were all thanked enthusiastically for a stimulating week of talks and discussions. The workshop was concluded over evening refreshments.




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