The objective of this grant is to support the 2012 Stochastic Networks Conference (the tenth international conference on stochastic networks), to be held on June 18-22, 2012, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. This week-long event continues a tradition that was started in 1987 and that has now become a biennial event. Its aim is to bring together leading researchers who share an interest in stochastic network models, to survey recent developments, and chart future research directions. As in the past, the meeting will be structured in a workshop format, with approximately twenty hour-long invited talks, and ample free time, so as to maximize interactions between speakers and participants. In addition, there will be a poster session for contributed papers. Stochastic networks is a multifaceted area of research dealing with the modeling, stability, control, performance, approximation, and design of stochastic networks. It gives rise to challenging and subtle mathematical problems, whose solution often requires a combination of ideas and techniques from several branches of mathematics. Research in this area is strongly motivated by applications in diverse domains, ranging from the traditional areas of telecommunications and manufacturing to service operations, biological and social networks, revenue management, and health care.
Like its predecessors, the 2012 Stochastic Networks Conference will emphasize new model structures and new mathematical problems that are motivated by contemporary developments in various application domains, as well as new mathematical methods for stochastic network analysis. It is intended to provide intellectual guidance to the large community of researchers in the field of stochastic networks, by highlighting the most recent and active research directions. The field of stochastic networks has direct impact on multiple fields of science (both social and physical), engineering, and management. Thus, this conference is aimed at fostering important advances that can affect practice in multiple application areas.
This NSF award provided support to the Stochastic Networks Conference, which was held on June 18-22, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA , and specifically, support for travel and lodging of invited speakers as well as student travel grants. This conference was part of an ongoing series of conferences regularly held since 1987. As in the past, the 2012 conference brought together leading mathematicians and applied researchers who share an interest in stochastic network models. This is a field whichis vibrant and fast developing, with many new directions and applications emerging. The conference is aimed at highlighting some of the best theoretical developments in the area, and promoting interactions between leading researchers. The talks and presentations covered a wide and representative cross-section of the most active areas of current research. They included foundational mathematical work on stochastic networks and queueing theory, as well on other topics in applied probability that involve network phenomena. In addition, there was a rich presence of talks geared towards various application domains such as network discovery, genomics, communication networks, per-to-peer networks, data centers, and incentive mechanisms in societal networks. Overall, the conference was successful in providing a snapshot of the field. It attracted close to 150 speakers and attendees, including some of the most prominent active researchers in the field. Besides invited speaker presentations, there were 20 poster presentations. In addition, there was plenty of time between talks for the researchers to interact and explore future directions.
