This workshop, a formal collaboration between ICERM and the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM), is one in a series of annual REUF workshops. These workshops bring together leading research mathematicians and faculty based at primarily undergraduate institutions to investigate open questions in the mathematical sciences and to equip participants with tools to engage in research with undergraduate students. REUF also serves to jump-start faculty who want to re-engage in research or who are considering a change in their research area.

The goals of this workshop are to promote undergraduate research and to forge research collaborations among the participating faculty. The majority of the workshop will be spent working on problems in small research groups, reporting on progress, and formulating plans for future work. Note that there are opportunities for participants to continue research activities beyond the workshop week, which will be discussed during the workshop.

Preference will... (more)

Designing, planning, and operating many systems is challenging due to the possibility of high-impact rare events. A motivating application is the electricity power grid, whose operation can be significantly disrupted by rare weather events such as a severe storm or a polar vortex. This workshop will explore optimization and simulation approaches to designing, planning, and operating systems impacted by such events. Stochastic optimization is one approach for optimizing such systems, in which the uncertain outcomes are modeled with random variables. Rare and high-impact events provide a challenge for stochastic optimization because (1) it is difficult to estimate the likelihood of rare events, (2) estimates of expected values with outcomes that have very low probability but high cost are inherently unstable, and (3) the actual distribution of the random events is often not known. Alternatively, robust and distributionally robust optimization models attempt to identify a solution that is... (more)

Dehn surgery has played a central role in the development of low-dimensional topology since it was first introduced by Max Dehn in 1910. Its study has stimulated several fascinating techniques that incorporate ideas from across mathematics: hyperbolic geometry, representation varieties, combinatorics, sutured manifold theory, and Floer homology, to name a few. These tools have led to sensational progress in understanding problems about Dehn surgery and low-dimensional topology at large. Furthermore, they seem well-suited to attack the major open problems in the area, such as the Berge conjecture and the L-space conjecture.

The workshop will function as a graduate summer school. At its core, the school will feature a sequence of mini-courses delivered by a cast of leading experts and distinguished expositors. The courses will unveil Dehn surgery and this suite of techniques to the next generation of researchers in the area. The school will additionally feature guided problem sessions... (more)

The Women in Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology workshop (WiSCon) is a Research Collaboration Conference for Women (RCCW) in the fields of contact and symplectic geometry/topology and related areas of low-dimensional topology. The goal of this workshop is to bring together women and nonbinary researchers at various career stages in these mathematical areas to collaborate in groups on projects designed and led by female leaders in the field. See below for information regarding project leaders and topics.

The mathematical fields of symplectic and contact geometry/topology, rooted in concepts from classical physics, have experienced huge growth in the past few decades. This growth has come in many forms, including multiple flavors of homology theories, symplectic embedding problems, techniques for regularizing spaces of pseudoholomorphic curves, and examples of mirror symmetry, to name a few. This workshop aims to generate research collaborations which build on the growing... (more)

WiSDM 2019 is a research collaboration workshop targeted toward women working in data science and mathematics. This program will bring together women at all stages of their careers, from graduate students to senior researchers, to collaborate on problems in data science.

Data science is typically characterized as work at the intersection of mathematics, computer science, statistics, and an application domain. The scientific focus will be on cutting-edge problems in network analysis for gene detection, group dynamics, graph clustering, novel statistical and topological learning algorithms, tensor product decompositions, reconciliation of assurance of anonymity and privacy with utility measures for data transfer and analytics, as well as efficient and accurate completion, inference and fusion methods for large data and correlations.

Applications are now open. Applicants should rank their top 3 choices of projects in their personal statement. Project descriptions can be found below.... (more)

Mathematical modelers face a variety of challenges, including summarizing large data sets to understand and explore a system of interest, inferring the model parameters most accurate for describing a given data set, and assessing the goodness-of-fit between data sets. Computational topology provides a lens through which these challenges may be addressed. At the same time, just as topological techniques provide opportunities for modelers, the challenges that modelers face give rise to opportunities for applied topologists. For instance, topologists may develop techniques that make model predictions based on the topology of experimental or simulation data, that analyze time-varying data, or that turn model outputs into formats suitable for machine learning.

This workshop brings together the applied mathematical modeling and applied topology communities, aiming to give modelers exposure to topological techniques still not commonly used in their community, and to give topologists exposure... (more)