Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences - PIMS

The Alberta Topology Seminar (ATS) retreat will be held at the Goldeye resort outside Nordegg, AB. 

This meeting focuses on unsolved problems in low-dimensional homotopy theory
and combinatorial group theory. These include Whitehead's Asphericity
Conjecture, the Andrews-Curtis Conjecture, Wall's Domination Problem in
dimension two, the relation gap problem, and the Eilenberg-Ganea Conjecture.
This seminar is in succession to similar conferences held in Luttach (Italy),
the Pacific Northwest, and Russia.

The workshop format emphasizes detailed discussion of ideas in progress and
collaboration of the participants, from advanced graduate students to
early-career researchers to senior experts.

Update 15 May 2009:  The National
Science Foundation, Division of Mathematical Sciences, has awarded Portland
State University a grant for participant support (partial subsidies towards
travel expenses), and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences has
granted supplementary support for the same purpose.

Symposium in Honour of David Brydges and Joel Feldman
 on the occasion of their 60th birthdays

This is also part of the CRM-PIMS Thematic Group on Challenges and Perspectives in Probability.

PIMS is co-sponsoring a Canada/Korea Special Session on Algebraic Geometry and Topology, June 6-8, at the CMS Meeting in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Statistical Methods for Dynamic System Models
Differential Equation Models
Statistics
Parameter Estimation
Model Building

More info: http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~dac5/workshop09/Welcome.html

The Langlands programme dominates the representation theory of linear algebraic groups over local and global fields. The theme of this workshop is the exploration of some of the geometric ideas appearing in recent advances in the Langlands programme, with an emphasis on results which apply to both function fields and number fields.

For more information, please visit the official website at

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/08-09/Langlands/

The goal of the conference is to promote cross-disciplinary research in statistical methods in engineering, science and technology. This is to be interpreted broadly to cover a wide range of application areas including environment, information and manufacturing sciences. The conference is intended to stimulate interactions among statisticians, researchers in the application areas, and industrial practitioners. It will provide a forum where participants can describe current research, identify important problems and areas of application, and formulate future research directions.

The general topic of the conference was the theory and application of
discrete structures and its goal was to highlight the most salient
trends in the field, which has close links to such diverse areas as
cryptography, computer science, large-scale networks and biology. The
conference brought together researchers from the various disciplines
with which discrete and algorithmic mathematics interact.

Particular areas of interest were the following: graphs and digraphs, hypergraphs,
matroids, ordered sets, designs, coding theory, enumeration,
combinatorics of words, discrete optimization, discrete and
computational geometry, lattice point enumeration, combinatorial
algorithms, computational complexity, and applications of discrete and
algorithmic mathematics, including (but not limited to) web graphs,
computational biology, telecommunication networks, and information
processing.

The goal of this workshop is to highlight emerging new topics in
spatial probability, and related areas where probabilistic ideas play
an important role. The emphasis is on types of questions and approaches
that are not largely based on existing techniques. We have invited
researchers with a variety of backgrounds, to help cross-fertilization
between areas. Some topics that the organizers have in mind are below,
although speakers have the freedom to choose what they find suitable.

Combinatorial optimization problems with a stochastic component are a source of
challenging open questions. Examples are the traveling salesman problem
on a random set of points, other optimal path problems on random data,
and allocation problems. Heuristics from statistical physics often
suggest conjectures, open to investigation. Interacting spatial
processes has been an active area since the 1970s, with interesting
connections to other fields of mathematics such as random permutations,
and PDEs. Such processes with non-local interactions have not been
studied extensively. Interesting examples of deterministic processes
have been found, where randomness plays a role in the analysis, such as
crystal growth or sandpiles. These types of connections between
deterministic and random are likely to be the source of intriguing
questions in the future.

Abstract harmonic analysis and related topics (Banach algebra, operator spaces, geometric functional analysis, etc.).

The ties between combinatorics and probability run so deep that for
many deep and interesting problems, it is nonsensical to try to assign
one category or the other. The subject of this workshop is these sorts
of problems, many of which in fact come from the theoretical computer
science and statistical physics communities. Most of the speakers
straddle two or several of these areas in their research. We expect the
workshop to both expose participants to cutting edge research in
combinatorics and probability, and, importantly, to lead to fruitful
discussions and the opening of new avenues of research.