Travel support will be provided for 14 young researchers and 1 frontier session organizer from US institutions to attend the 2011 Applied Probability Conference to be held in Stockholm, Sweden. Priority for support will be given to researchers who have received their PhD within the last five years and to graduate students in the last year of their PhD programs, as well as worthy candidates from underrepresented groups.
Applied probability is an extremely active area of research and interest in the field cuts across many scientific disciplines including operations research, computer science, combinatorics, mathematics, statistics, physics and biology. Researchers from these different fields raise different questions about and bring different perspectives to similar problems. Thus, there is great benefit in bringing together these researchers to enable cross-fertilization of ideas. The Applied Probability Society is a focus group within the INFORMS (INstitute For Operations Research and the Management Sciences) professional society. Its biannual conferences have established themselves as a leading forum in the field of applied probability. The conference will consist of three plenary talks from distinguished speakers, two tutorial sessions, over seventy invited and contributed sessions, each of ninety minutes duration with three speakers. In addition, there will also be a few ``frontier'' sessions, in which survey talks and open problems in areas of research at the cutting edge of applied probability will be presented such as random matrix theory, smart grids and systems biology.
The conference plays a major role in establishing connections between different areas of applied probability that can potentially lead to significant new developments in the field. The conference also serves an important educational purpose, enabling young researchers from all around the world to present their work and at the same time keep abreast of the latest advances in the field.
The 16th Applied Probability Conference, sponsored by the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS and co-sponsored by the IMS, was held from July 6th-8th, 2011, on the campus of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. This three-day conference is part of a series of biannual conferences that is considered a leading forum in applied probability. The 2011 conference was organized by Henrik Hult of KTH, Kavita Ramanan of Brown University and Martin Reiman of Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, with the help of a program committee and a local organizing committee. The conference had over 350 participants from 36 countries spanning 5 continents. There were approximately 44 invited sessions, 16 contributed sessions and 42 additional sessions of contributed talks. Funding for advanced graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers with recently completed Ph.D.'s to attend the conference was provided by the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation under this grant: A list of people who were supported by this grant include: XinYun Chen Peter Frazier Xuefeng Gao David Goldberg Henry Lam Guodong Pang Kostas Spiliopoulos Yizao Wang Wei Wu The conference featured three plenary talks, two tutorials and two special "Frontier Sessions" on relatively new areas of active research. The website for the conference can be found at: www.informs.org/Community/Conferences/APS2011 As approved by NSF-DMS, funds left over from this grant (due to a couple of no-shows of people who requested and were awarded grant money) were used to support student participation at the "Stochastic Networks" conference, organized at MIT in June, 2012. The PI was the Chair of the Steering Committee for this conference at that time. The following students were supported for the Stochastic Networks conference: Yashodan Kanoria Brian Nowakowski Xiaoxuan Zhang Svitlana Pustova Guodong Pang Tonghoon Suk Alessandro Zocca Siva Theja Maguluri
