Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

About ninety participants from all over the world gathered
in Toronto for this symposium. It featured eight invited
talks, seven minisymposia with 3–4 talks each; about 30
contributed talks, as well as 15 student contributions in the
student paper competition. Topics ranged from core iterative
methods and eigenvalues to preconditioning, multigrid
and parallel computation, as well as optimization, nonlinear
equations and differential equations. Applications such
as data and web mining, image processing, computational
finance and computational fluid dynamics received special
attention.
The symposium received funding from the Fields Institute,
the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo
and MITACS, so that 13 applications for funding by
students and postdoctoral fellows were at least partially
funded, and five awards were given to student paper competition
winners.
The Bahen Centre for Information Technology (BCIT)
at the University of Toronto served as hosting venue. The
high-ceiling hallways of BCIT were the ideal place for
informal discussions and breaks, while the projectors in the
rooms booked for the conference were working full-time
during scientific sessions. Many participants indicated
their appreciation of the high quality of the talks and the
interaction provided by the conference. A special issue of
the Applied Numerical Mathematics journal, arising from
the symposium, will be sponsored by IMACS. On the social
front, participants enjoyed the hospitality of the downtown
Chinatown and of the Greek village on the Danforth, as
well as the ethnic diversity and colour of Baldwin Street.
Invited Speakers:
Tony Chan (UCLA)
Duality-based iterative methods for total variation minimization
Tom Coleman (Cornell)
Minimizing VaR, CVaR and hedging issues for a portfolio of
derivatives
Andrew Conn (IBM)
Derivative free optimization – some new results
Paul Fischer (Argonne National Laboratory)
Spectral element multigrid for the incompressible Navier
Stokes equations
G e n e r a l S c i e n t i f i c A c t i v i t i e s
Ilse Ipsen (North Carolina)
Analysis and computation of Google’s page rank
Tim Kelley (North Carolina)
Continuation algorithms for parameter dependent compact
fixed point problems
Kees Oosterlee (DIAM)
A novel multigrid based preconditioner for heterogeneous
Helmholtz problems
Andy Wathen (Oxford)
Fast solvers for incompressible flow
Workshop on Mathematical Modeling and Analysis of
Computer Networks
May 6, 2005
Held at the University of Waterloo
Organizers: Shie Mannor (McGill) and Peter Marbach
(Toronto)
This one-day workshop was part of the IFIP conference
Networking 2005 held at the University of Waterloo. The
workshop brought together researchers with a background
in mathematics and/or computer networks in order to
explore how mathematics can be used to model and analyze
these networks.
Mathematical models have played an important role in the
understanding of computer networks – in particular in the
understanding of their fundamental performance limits
and of the trade-offs involved. Because the network infrastructure
keeps changing and new applications emerge,
the mathematical models used need to evolve as well. The
goal of the workshop was to explore recent advances in
the mathematical modeling and analysis of computer
networks.
The talks represented recent work on topics such as
network coding, mobility models for wireless networks,
auction mechanism for spectrum sharing in cellular networks,
and the spreading of internet worms. Mathematical
models used to study these issues ranged from stochastic
models (random walks and Brownian motion, diffusion
processes, large deviation) to optimization (such as geometric
programming and semi-definite programming) and
game theory.
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 76