Stan Biweekly Roundup, 6 October 2017

Jonah Gabry returned from teaching a one-week course for a special EU research institute in Spain. Mitzi Morris has been knocking out bug fixes for the parser and some pull requests to refactor the underlying type inference to clear the way for tuples, sparse matrices, and higher-order functions. Michael Betancourt with help from Sean Talts spent last week teaching an intro course to physicists about Stan. Charles Margossian attended and said it went really well. Ben Goodrich, in addition to handling a slew of RStan issues has been diving into the math library to define derivatives for Bessel functions. Aki Vehtari has put us in touch with the MxNet developers at Amazon UK and we had our first conference call with them to talk about adding sparse matrix functionality to Stan (Neil Lawrence is working there now).