The arrangement of point configurations in metric spaces, whether deterministic or random, is a truly interdisciplinary topic of great interest in mathematics, physics and computer science. Mathematical aspects involve optimization, discretization of manifolds, best packing and cubature, among others. For physics, such configurations arise in the study of crystallization, point processes connected with random matrices, self-assembling materials, jammed states, hyperuniformity and phase transitions. For computer science, extremal point configurations play a fundamental role in coding and information theory, and lattice-based protocols in cryptography and related computational complexity issues are of growing importance. Furthermore, there has been recent and substantial progress on related age-old problems (such as the Kepler conjecture).

The investigation of the above topics often evolves from the development of efficient computational methods that enable extensive numerical experiments. In turn, these experiments suggest conjectures that become the focus of rigorous theorem proving, which may also require some computer assistance.  The program topics include random point configurations, computation and optimization of energy, packing and covering, multi-pole methods, sparsity, and frames, and the theory of lattices with applications to coding and cryptography.