The earliest references to the practical use of Bayesian Statistics date back to the Second World War. The famous mathematician Alan Turing used Bayes' theorem to decipher the orders, hidden in the Enigma code, that the German army sent to its submarines sailing in the North Atlantic. Today, Bayesian statistics has become an increasingly useful and necessary tool for analysing phenomena with uncertainty and data: The US Navy used Bayesian algorithms for the search of the Air France flight 447 lost in the Atlantic in 2009; Google uses Bayes' rule for automatic decision making in its driverless car; Microsoft uses Bayesian filters to detect spam;  NASA uses Bayesian methods for risk assessment; Archaeology uses the Bayesian paradigm for the dating of archaeological remains, and so on.

The eighth edition of the València International Bayesian Summer School, VIBASS8 (http://vabar.es/events/vibass8/), starts next Monday 7th July. It is an international summer school in Bayesian Statistics organised by the Bayesian Inference research group VABAR (vabar.es) of the Universitat de València, which will be held at the ETSE from Monday 7 to Thursday 10 July 2025. The school is directed by professors Rubén Amorós and Francisco Palmí from the University of Valencia and Facundo Muñoz from CIRAD, with the support of the Faculty of Mathematics and the School of Engineering (ETSE). In addition to the Universitat de València, the University of Castilla-la Mancha, the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the research centres Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland and CIRAD in France.The summer school has two very distinct parts. The sessions on Monday and Tuesday are a basic introduction to Bayesian Statistics, both methodological and applied. This 12-hour basic course includes both conceptual and practical sessions. The latter are designed so that students can consolidate and apply the knowledge from the theoretical sessions.

The second part of the school is of a more specialised nature and takes place on Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10. The course of this edition is "Bayesian modelling with R package brms". This 12 h course will be taught by Javier Enrique Aguilar (Doctoral Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence SimTech at the University of Stuttgart and Research Assistant at TÚ Dortmund, Germany).