Serendipity-doo-dah

Serendipity-ay!

Thank you, Amazon! Searching for the book "Search Methodologies", I came across the book "The Craft of Probabilistic Modelling", which looks pretty interesting. However, this was on Amazon DE and I had trouble understanding; I moved to Amazon UK, hoping to find more about the content. Lo and behold, not only did I find that book, I found the proceeding from the "Process Algebra and Probabilistic Methods: Performance Modeling and Verification" conferences held in 2001 and 2002. Why had I not heard of this conference before? Will it be held again?

Searching Google with "PAPM-PROBMIV" (a rather unlikely string of characters in any other context, I expect) turned up 9660 matches. Unfortunately, this seems to be one of those conferences without a permanent institution or society, the type whose web site is re-invented each year by the organizing-hosting-venue owner: very tedious to find all the years.

2001 : First edition, Aachen, Germany, "Co-located with MMB and PNPM"
2002 : Second edition, associated with FLoC '02, affiliated with CAV 2002
2003 :
2004 : QEST 2004, Enschede, The Netherlands
2005 : joined International Conference on Modeling Techniques and Tools for Computer Performance Evaluation (TOOLS) and the International Workshop on Petri Nets and Performance Models (PNPM) to form QEST'05 - The International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems
2006 : QEST 2006 , Riverside, California, September 11-14, 2006

The book that caught my eye, "The Craft of Probabilistic Modelling", is currently unavailable (dixit Springer-Verlag); Amazon lists a few used book sellers. I cannot find the table of contents. The German Amazon site has more info than the UK one, it lists the authors of the chapters (it is "a collection of personal accounts"), so I'll see what I can find about their specialities:

• N. T. Bailey (The Mathematical Theory of Infectious Diseases and its Applications. Hafner Press, New York, 1975.)
• J. W. Cohen (Extreme value distribution for the M/G/1 and the G/M/1 queueing systems. Annales de l'institut Henri Poincaré (B) Probabilités et Statistiques),(Random Walk with a Heavy-Tailed Jump Distribution. Queueing Syst. 40(1): 35-73 (2002))
• W. J. Ewens (Aspects of Optimality Behavior in Population Genetics Theory. Evolution and Biocomputation 1995: 7-17)
• E. J. Hannan (Applications of Time Series Analysis in Astronomy and Meteorology,Chapman & Hall, March 1997)
• M. Iosifesu (Dependence with complete connections and its applications, FINITE MARKOV PROCESSES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS, RANDOM PROCESSES AND LEARNING)
• J. Keilson (A note on the summability of the entropy series. Information and Control, 18(3):257-260, April 1971. Multi-Server Threshold Queues with Hysteresis. Perform. Eval. 21(3): 185-213 (1995))
• D. G. Kendall
• M. Kimura (research interests:
  * Mathematical methods for modeling and analysis of complex systems
  * Statistical analysis of World Wide Web
  * Nonlinear time series analysis based on dynamical systems theory
  * Machine learning
  * Neural computation )
• M. F. Neuts (The fundamental period of the queue with Markov-modulated arrivals,), (Matrix-Geometric Solutions in Stochastic Models: An Algorithmic Approach,)
• K. R. Parthasarathy (Probability Measures on Metric Spaces, 1967), (Positive definite kernels, continuous tensor products and central limit theorems of probability theory, 1972), (An Introduction to Quantum Stochastic Calculus, 1992), (The Mathematics of Error Correcting Quantum Codes)
• N. U. Prabhu
• H. Solomon
• R. Syski
• L. Takacs
• R. L. Tweedie
• D. Vere-Jones (Some applications of probability generating functionals to the study of input-output streams. J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 30, 321--333. R-2)
• G. S. Watson
• P. Whittle
• J. Gani (Herausgeber)