Stochasticity is fundamental to biological systems. While in many situations the system can be viewed as a large number of similar agents interacting in a homogeneously mixing environment so the dynamics are captured well by ordinary differential equations or other deterministic models. In many more situations, the system can be driven by a small number of agents or strongly influenced by an envir...

The structure of the 2011-12 UQ program is unique among SAMSI programs in that, instead of running two year-long programs in parallel as is usually done, we are running one UQ program that has four sub-programs with which individual workshops are associated:

Methodology Program
Climate Modeling Program
Engineering and Renewable Energy Program
Geosciences Program
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The Mathematics of Information program will involve invited long-term visitors, New Direction Visiting Professors, as well as postdoctoral fellows. Six workshops on rapidly growing research areas are being organized. In addition, there will be tutorials as well as short courses offered to introduce graduate students, postdocs, and other researchers in neighboring areas to the topics covered in the...

The program will be led by Helmut Hofer, Institute for Advanced Study, and John Mather, Princeton University. There will be weekly seminars and two workshops held during the weeks of October 10, 2011, and March 12, 2012.

This workshop will be devoted to the relation between symplectic invariants
(namely Gromov-Witten and Symplectic Field Theory) and the theory of infinite
dimensional integrable systems.

The goal of this program is to bring together researchers in complex dynamics, arithmetic dynamics, and related fields, with the purpose of stimulating interactions, promoting collaborations, making progress on fundamental problems, and developing theoretical and computational foundations on which future work will build. Complex dynamics is the study of iteration of holomorphic self-maps of a comp...

This workshop will bring leading
experts and new researchers from pharmaceutical companies and academic
institutions to share their perspectives on current mechanism-based
systems approaches in drug discovery and development programs in
oncology.

This interdisciplinary workshop will address challenging problems in radar imaging. For more information, please visit the webpage.

Most biological systems from the subcellular to the population population level must solve the following difficult problem. They must continue to function reliably despite continually changing environmental inputs and despite individual differences in internal parameters due to genetic polymorphisms. That is, their functions should be robust to natural biological variability. On the other hand, th...

This workshop will be devoted to the area between carefully crafted stochastic
models of single neurons and large networks of simpler ones.

The era of quantitative biology, and abundant data, calls for theoreticians and and experimentalists to address a fundamental scientific question: how can we learn as much as possible about the biological system we are studying - and make justified inferential statements about it - on the basis of combining theoretical models and experimental data? Related questions include: how to identify model ...

The last decade has seen vigorous research activity to understand systems involving long-range effects, and to directly incorporate such effects in the modeling and analysis. This research has led to fundamental questions about several classes of nonlocal partial differential equations (PDEs), such as their long-time existence and regularity.

This workshop will be devoted to the classification problem for fusion categories,
including those with additional structure, e.g. ribbon and modular fusion categories.
More specifically, we will focus on the development and application of both theoretical
and computational techniques for classifying fusion categories that are "small" in
various senses.

High energy density physics (HEDP) is a rapidly growing field. HEDP conditions are typically from Mbar to tens of Gbar pressures and temperatures ranging from eV to GeV. This long program will focus on the computational approaches to the modeling of these extreme states of matter. It will address the scientific challenges facing the computational HEDP community and discuss the successes and failur...

The study of epidemiology, evolutionary biology and immunology are well-developed fields in their own right. However, current problems in disease dynamics have arisen that cross these disciplinary boundaries and where stochastic modeling and methods are essential to progress in these fields. Stochasticity plays an important role in the study of emergence of new diseases, pathogen evolution in resp...

This workshop will be devoted to the integral motive, Chow groups and etale
cohomology of abelian varieties, and applications to arithmetic geometry.

This workshop will be devoted to the study of vector equilibrium problems and
their application to the asymptotic analysis of random matrix models.

This workshop will focus on numerical
techniques for the solution of nonlinear acoustic problems with
application to cancer treatment by means of high-intensity focused
ultrasound.

In many situations it is adequate to assume that systems are homogeneously mixing and to take the limit of large populations, but in a number of cases the spatial distribution of individuals changes the behavior of the system. This workshop will focus on the impact of these effects on a wide variety of systems ranging from the scale of microbes to populations of plants and animals on a local and g...

Over the past 40 years, tissue engineering / regenerative medicine (TERM) has grown from concepts to established medical treatments used in over one million patients. As of 2007, there were approximately 50 firms offering TERM products with annual sales in excess of $1.3 billion, which represent more than a ten-fold increase from 5 years before.

Despite the impressive economic growth of the fie...

In recent years, methods from algebra, algebraic geometry, and discrete mathematics have found new and unexpected applications in biology. Evolutionary biology and systems biology are two application areas that have been particularly fruitful. The random processes that underlie evolution are best captured by stochastic models. Algebraic methods provide new ways of constructing and analyzing such m...

This workshop will be devoted to two closely connected
conjectures in the minimal model program.

This workshop will be devoted to developing
high dimensional contact topology.

The theme of this workshop is the computation, modeling, and mathematical analysis of heterostructured nanocyrstalline materials. This includes quantum dots, nanowires, graphene, and grain boundaries. These various phenomena will be discussed in the context of modeling and computation on different scales ranging from density functional theory to continuum mechanics. The workshop will also address ...

This workshop will be devoted
to questions associated to the following 1984 conjecture of
Guralnick's: There exists a ''universal constant'' C which bounds
1-cohomology.

In collaboration with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, eight U.S. students and eight Hong Kong/Chinese students will work on cross-cultural teams on four projects, each sponsored by a company based in the region. The basic format of the program is the same as RIPS-LA. Applications are due Feb. 12.

FEEC is a recent advance in the mathematics of finite element methods that employs differential complexes to construct stable numerical schemes for several important types of application problems. It has aroused great interest because it both presents interesting mathematical problems and shows great potential for application in computational science and engineering. The concentrated sequence of l...

This workshop will be devoted to
the study of recent advances in understanding deformations of Riemann
surfaces via the Weil-Petersson metric on Teichmuller and moduli spaces.

The Summer@ICERM program is designed for a select group of 10-12 undergraduate scholars. Students will work in small groups of two or three, supervised by a faculty advisor and aided by a teaching assistant. The faculty advisors will describe a variety of enticing open questions in geometry and in dynamical systems of geometric origin. Topics discussed will include Euclidean, hyperbolic and projec...

The course is intended for researchers who have had exposure to RMT (through e.g. the books of Mehta, of Anderson-Guionnet-Zeitouni, or of Deift and co-authors), and that are interested in learning recent techniques and results in RMT.

Problems from materials science provide a rich source of mathematical and computational challenges. These problems often have a multiscale character; for example, the atomic structure of a material influences its macroscopic properties. Purely continuum models also raise multiscale issues - involving for example the formation and evolution of patterns as a consequence of loading, phase transformat...

The Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) Program provides an opportunity for high-achieving undergraduate students to work in teams on a real-world research project proposed by a sponsor from industry or the public sector. Applications are due Feb. 12.

Nonlocal discrete models are common in many applications. For example, molecular dynamics and other particle methods having interactions that extend beyond nearest neighbors are in common use. Less popular are nonlocal continuum models which are very much dominated in their usage by local continuum models and especially differential equation models.

However, in recent years, there has been burg...

One of the challenges for machine learning, AI, and computational neuroscience is the problem of learning representations of the perceptual world. This summer school will review recent developments in feature learning and learning representations, with a particular emphasis on "deep learning" methods, which can learn multi-layer hierarchies of representations.

PSW@MBI is a week-long workshop where participating mathematical modelers tackle questions proposed by life science researchers. Similar workshops have provided fresh perspectives and new ideas to proposed questions and established new interdisciplinary collaborations between theoreticians and life scientists.

The workshop gives the opportunity to practitioners and researchers in medicine and t...

Many important advances in material and biomedical science will come from controlling the chemical properties and nanoscale morphology of polymer mixtures. Predicting the longtime continuum-level properties of such complex systems poses a canonical computational challenge due to the disparate length and time scales separating the molecular description from the macroscopic behavior, particularly th...

The first three days will be spent on technical presentations by leading researchers and industry experts, to bring everyone up to speed on the currently used methodology. On the fourth day, the participants will self-organize into working groups, each of which will address one of the key problem areas (it is permitted that people join more than one group, and the organizers will try to arrange th...

This workshop will be devoted to
the study of invariants related to a few important problems at the
intersection of geometric analysis and Banach space theory.

The theory of infinite dimensional dynamical systems is a vibrant field of mathematical development and has become central to the study of complex physical, biological, and societal processes. The most immediate examples of a theoretical nature are found in the interplay between invariant structures and the qualitative behavior of solutions to evolutionary partial differential equations (PDEs) of ...

This year-long SAMSI program focuses on fundamental methodological questions of statistics, mathematics and computer science posed by massive datasets, with applications to astronomy, high energy physics, and the environment. Serious challenges posed by massive datasets have to do with "scalability" and "data streaming". Techniques developed for small or moderate-sized datasets simply do not trans...

The program will focus on issues of mathematical and statistical theory and methodology that must be addressed to improve evidence-based healthcare decision-making. It will be diverse in terms of science and participants. The goal is to strengthen the link between data and decisions, a path that includes major challenges in mathematical modeling and statistical inference. The program will highligh...

Modern explorations in science, technology and medicine increasingly demand complex stochastic models. Computational and theoretical advances are needed in order to formulate, analyze, apply and interpret these models. Recent years have witnessed a remarkable interplay between computation and probability. On the one hand, probabilistic techniques have led to powerful computational methods such as ...

Material defects present a huge challenge for mathematical modeling and simulation, as anything that breaks up the regular, homogeneous structure of a calculation requires special consideration. In recent years, there has been particular focus on the multiscale nature of materials research. The workshops in this program will continue this trend, but with a new emphasis on defects.

The main goal of this program which is co-organized by Steve Awodey (webpage http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/awodey/), Thierry Coquand (webpage http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~coquand/) and Vladimir Voevodsky (webpage http://www.math.ias.edu/~vladimir/Site3/home.html) is to make available to a wider mathematical audience the recent advances which may finally make it practical for pure mathematicians t...

We will focus on dynamics and information processing in large, nonlinear networks. The aim is to highlight a set of mathematical questions that recur across neuroscience, and to discuss both recent progress and outstanding problems. The final day will feature a series of retrospective talks on the interplay of mathematics and neuroscience, leading into moderated discussions of future prospects.The...

This is the seventh in a series of biannual conferences honoring David Blackwell and Richard Tapia, two seminal figures who inspired a generation of African-American, Native American and Latino/Latina students to pursue careers in mathematics. Carrying forward their work, this one and a half day conference will
-Recognize and showcase mathematical excellence by minority researchers
-Recognize an...

Cognitive neuroscience presents superb opportunities for mathematical contributions, especially in connecting different theoretical and experimental frameworks. On the experimental side, methods ranging from single-neuron recording to human behavioral tests are flourishing, and mathematical models are beginning to suggest how one leads to the other. Rigorous theoretical treatments from microeconom...

L-functions—vast generalizations of the Riemann zeta function— are fundamental objects of study in number theory. In the 1980's the idea emerged that it could be useful to tie together a family of related L-functions in one variable to create a "double Dirichlet series," which could be used to study the average behavior of the original family of L-functions. Double Dirichlet series soon became...

Mathematical neuroscience is required to understand the normal functions of the computational brain. As a corollary, we can translate our fundamental understanding of the nervous system to better understand and treat disorders of the brain.

There are a variety of brain diseases that are considered dynamical - where the symptoms are consequences of pathological parameters of the underlying neuro...

This program is intended to enhance communications between analysts and geometers by focusing on recent developments on the borderline of these subjects. There will be an active program of research activities, seminars and workshops throughout the three months.

This workshop will focus on how mathematics can help us determine the functional roles that oscillations play in the nervous system. This workshop is timely in view of recent evidence that oscillations are critical for cognitive states and sensory processing. A broad range of oscillatory activity will be covered, including hippocampal and cortical oscillations, motor patterns, sensory processing a...

It is natural think about the brain and brain function on four different levels: genomics, biochemistry, electrophysiology, and behavior. Enormous amounts of new information are becoming available on associations between genotypes and behavior. The causal mechanisms, which are mostly unknown, necessarily involve the effects of genotype on development, cellular biochemistry, and electrophysiology. ...

Mathematical analysis and modeling have played influential roles in the current and classical descriptions of sensory processing, object identification and representation. The bases for these descriptions have involved the properties of feedforward interactions, receptive-fields, and firing rates or spike counts and stimuli have typically been static in time and stereotypical (oriented bars, pure ...