Programs & Events
Monte Carlo Methods in the Physical and Biological Sciences
Oct 29 - Nov 2, 2012
Monte Carlo methods are one of the main tools used to study the properties of complex physical, chemical and biological systems. Since their introduction in the late 1940s, these methods have undergone a remarkable expansion and are now used in many other fields, including statistical inference, engineering, and computer science. However, the design and theoretical understanding of Monte Carlo methods is still a challenging topic, especially for those problems where rare events play the key role in determining algorithm performance. The aim of the workshop is to bring together specialists in the application areas who understand the specific challenges posed by realistic problems and have developed sophisticated tools to tackle these problems, and mathematicians developing methods for algorithm analysis, abstraction, and optimization.
Organizing Committee
- Bruce Berne
- Maria Cameron
- Jimmie Doll
- Paul Dupuis
- Eric Vanden-Eijnden
Uncertainty Quantification
Oct 9 - 13, 2012
Rapid growth in computational resources has heightened the expectation that scientific knowledge can indeed be a driver for societal well-being and betterment. At the same time, our ability to measure the natural and social world around has significantly increased, aided by technological development in sensors, the internet, and other modalities of communication. Science is thus faced, simultaneously, with a complex description of reality at an unprecedented resolution, and the possibility to describe this reality with mathematical models of increasing complexity. Probabilistic formulations of physical problems can be viewed as attempts to adapt rational procedures to this complexity, while tackling the conceptual challenges they inevitably present. As a testament to the significance of this confluence of mathematics, science, and technology, Uncertainty Quantification is arguably one of the fastest growing sub-disciplines in mechanics.
The communities of computational science,... (more)
Organizing Committee
- Roger Ghanem
- George Karniadakis
- Boris Rozovsky
- Marta Sanz-Sole
Bayesian Nonparametrics
Sep 17 - 21, 2012
Data-rich investigations need advanced tools for allowing data to inform and interact with models. Bayesian Nonparametrics is a rapidly growing subfield of statistics and machine learning that provides a framework for creating complex statistical models that are both expressive and tractable. Recent, successful applications of nonparametric Bayesian models across a variety of domains suggests that these models have the potential for wide use. The challenge of constructing and using models on very high dimensional or even infinite dimensional spaces creates many opportunities for fruitful interactions between mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists. Areas of interest include prior construction, posterior inference, posterior asymptotics, algorithmic development, and practical applications.
Organizing Committee
- Kassie Fronczyk
- Stuart Geman
- Matthew Harrison
- Michael Jordan
- Peter Mueller
- Erik Sudderth
Computational Challenges in Probability
Sep 5 - Dec 7, 2012
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 Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms, while on the other hand the calculation of probabilistic quantities such as modes and marginals of high-dimensional distributions and the analysis of data from random samples has posed several computational challenges.
The Fall 2012 Semester on "Computational Challenges in Probability" aims to bring together leading experts and young researchers who are advancing the use of probabilistic and computational methods to study complex models in a variety of fields. The goal is to identify common challenges, exchange existing tools, reveal new application areas... (more)
Organizing Committee
- Jose Blanchet
- Paul Dupuis
- Roger Ghanem
- George Karniadakis
- Kavita Ramanan
- Boris Rozovsky
- Eric Vanden-Eijnden
Bridging Scales in Computational Polymer Chemistry
Aug 6 - 10, 2012
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 the evolution of morphology. This workshop focuses on four overlapping approaches to bridging this gap: Accelerated Molecular Methods, Coarse-Graining of Molecular Dynamics, Computational Approaches to Self-Consistent Mean Field, and Coupled Molecular and Continuum-Variational models. The goal is to spur the development of hybrid computational methods with the capacity to identify and characterize the rare events and the driving forces which steer the systems towards equilibrium, and connect the burgeoning growth in parallel-computation techniques for particle-based systems with recently... (more)
Organizing Committee
- Andrew Christlieb
- Cecilia Clementi
- Keith Promislow
- Mark Tuckerman
- Zhengfu Xu
Summer@ICERM 2012: Geometry and Dynamics
Jun 18 - Aug 10, 2012
Imagine spending eight-weeks on the beautiful Brown University campus in historic Providence, RI, working in a small team setting to solve mathematical research problems developed by faculty experts in their fields.
Imagine creating career-building connections between peers, near peers (graduate students and postdocs), and academic professionals.
Imagine spending your summer in a fun, memorable, and intellectually stimulating environment.
Now, imagine having this experience with support for travel within the U.S., room and board paid, plus a $3,000 stipend*.
The Summer@ICERM 2012 program is designed for a select group of 10-12 undergraduate scholars. Students in the 2012 program worked in small groups of two or three, supervised by a faculty advisor and aided by a teaching... (more)
Organizing Committee
- Pat Hooper
- Sergei Tabachnikov
NSF/CBMS Conference: Finite Element Exterior Calculus (FEEC)
Jun 11 - 15, 2012
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 lectures in this program will provide participants with an understanding of the mathematical tools required to fully grasp the concepts in FEEC. ICERM is pleased to host this NSF-CBMS Regional Research Conference.
Douglas Arnold will deliver 10 lectures, one in the morning and one in the afternoon of each day of the workshop. Richard Falk and Anil Hirani will both give one presentation.
Limited funding is available to support participants.
Organizing Committee
- Alan Demlow
- Johnny Guzman
- Dmitriy Leykekhman
Research Experiences for Undergraduate Faculty (REUF)
Jun 4 - 8, 2012
This workshop, sponsored by AIM, ICERM, and the NSF, will introduce undergraduate faculty to research opportunities in several fields of mathematics that will equip them with the tools to mentor students in undergraduate research in mathematics. Lectures at the workshop will provide background information and introduce open problems. The majority of the workshop will be spent working on problems, reporting on progress, and formulating plans for future work.
The workshop will be hosted at ICERM.
Preference will be given to faculty who teach and advise substantial numbers of minority students.
Mathematical topics at the workshop will include algebra, graph theory, and number theory.
For more information email workshops@aimath.org or go to http://aimath.org/ARCC/workshops/reuf4.html.
Organizing Committee
- Leslie Hogben
- Roselyn Williams
- Ulrica Wilson
Heterostructured Nanocrystalline Materials
May 30 - Jun 1, 2012
The theme of this workshop is the computation, modeling, and mathematical analysis of heterostructured nanocrystalline 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 various techniques that allow one to combine models on different scales to yield efficient computational methods.
Organizing Committee
- Tim Schulze
- Vivek Shenoy
- Peter Smereka
Special Colloquium: "The Prevalence of Chaos"
May 3, 2012
Dynamics is the study of systems which evolve with known rules. We want to understand whether the long term behavior is predictable or chaotic. For example, is the solar system stable? Very often, this amounts to studying recursively defined sequences. After presenting various dynamical systems and showing what chaos is, I will focus on sequences of the form
For such sequences, the locus of chaos is known as a Julia set. I will present a result (joint with Arnaud Cheritat) that there exist parameters c ∈ C for which chaos prevails: with positive probability, a randomly chosen initial point Ζ0 will have unpredictable behavior.
This is a joint colloquium co-sponsored ICERM and the Clay Mathematics Institute. Thursday, May 3, 2012 from 4:00pm-5:00pm. There will... (more)
Moduli Spaces Associated to Dynamical Systems
Apr 16 - 20, 2012
This workshop will bring together dynamicists, number theorists, and algebraic geometers to study the geometry and arithmetic of dynamical moduli spaces. The set Ratdn of rational degree d self-maps of Pn has a natural structure as an affine variety. The dynamical moduli space Mdn is the quotient of Ratdn by the conjugation action of the group PGLn+1. Problems to be investigated include the geometry of Mdn, the distribution of special maps such as post-critically finite maps in Mdn, dynamical modular curves associated to one-parameter families of maps with a marked point of period N, and degeneration of families of maps and the associated points on the boundary of moduli space. A tutorial session will be held the week before this workshop.
Organizing Committee
- Laura DeMarco
- Adam Epstein
- Sarah Koch
- Curtis McMullen
- Joseph Silverman
Special Colloquium: "Smooth Topology-Preserving Approximations of Rough Domains"
Apr 12, 2012
The talk concerns bounded domains with continuous boundary. We study how the corresponding "good direction", with respect to which the boundary is locally a graph of a continuous function, varies in a neighborhood of the boundary, and thus show how such domains can be approximated both from the inside and the outside by topologically equivalent smooth domains. The good directions form a globally-defined field that carries some topological information about the domain, which we explore. Finally we describe a surprising consequence of the study, that the domain has portions of the boundary with better regularity. This is joint work with Arghir Zarnescu.
This is a joint colloquium co-sponsored by Applied Mathematics, Mathematics, and ICERM. Thursday, April 12, 2012 from 4:30-5:30pm in the lecture hall at ICERM. There will be a reception at 4pm preceding the talk.