This is a proposal for participant travel support to attend the Annual Graduate Student Probability Conference for the years 2011 and 2012. In 2007, a group of graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW), with assistance from Professor Thomas Kurtz, organized the first Graduate Student Probability Conference. This conference provided students and postdoctoral fellows from across the country with the opportunity to interact with their peers and learn about exciting new directions of research in Probability from some of the leaders in the field. The fifth conference in the series will be held April 29-May 1, 2011 while the sixth one is tentatively scheduled for April 27-29, 2012. Over the three days of the conference, participants - primarily graduate students and postdocs - will have the opportunity to deliver and attend talks on a variety of topics in Probability Theory. In addition to student and postdoc speakers, there will be two keynote speakers who will survey recent developments and future directions in their area of expertise each giving three fifty-minute talks. Professor Nathalie Eisenbaum (Laboratoire de Probabilites, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie) and Professor Philip Protter (Cornell/Columbia University) have accepted the invitation to be keynote speakers.
The annual Graduate Student Probability Conference (GSPC) for the years 2011 and 2012 was hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology during the periods April 29-May 1, 2011 and April 27-29, 2012. The origin of these conferences began in 2007 with a group of graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW). After they hosted it for 2 years, it was passed to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then to Duke University. The Georgia Tech conferences were supported under DMS-1103973. A 6-member organizing team, with the advise of a faculty member, composed of graduate students was fully in charge of all aspects of conference organization. The host school provided facilities and covered local organizing expenses. NSF funding was used to pay most of the expenses for student/postdoctoral fellow speakers. Other sources of funds were used to partly cover the keynote speakers expenses so as to maximize the amount left for the students. Intellectual Merit: Over the three-day conference, participants --- primarily graduate students and postdoctoral fellows --- had the opportunity to deliver and attend talks on a variety of topics in Probability Theory. In addition, the keynote speakers surveyed recent developments and future directions in their area of expertise. Broader Impacts of the conference were to: Provide graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with the opportunity to speak on an area of interest within probability Foster discussions within a friendly and informal atmosphere Establish lasting connections for potential future collaborations Introduce recent developments in probability from keynote speakers Organization and external funding proposal writing for the conference provided the students involved, a valuable confidence building experience that will be useful in future engagements in collaborative and sponsored research activities.
