The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota will hold a three week conference on Molecular Minimization Aspects of Large-Scale Optimization. The third week will be devoted to molecular and structural optimization, in particular, the global minimization problem. The conference will bring together two scientific communities (the biological, biochemical and biophysical and the mathematical programmers) which have much to discuss together but have yet to develop a common language and conceptual framework. Issues which will be addressed include: 1. New algorithmic advances for global minimization in protein folding; 2. Global molecular conformation problems; 3. Electrical impedance tomography; 4. Problems with multiple local minima; and 5. Parallelization and the use of high performance computers. The discussions will attempt to (I) identify the precise physical problems from the practioners point of view; (ii) determine the available methods for attacking these problems; and, in the long term (iii) narrow the gap between the two.
