The goal of the conference is to have talks by both well established and promising probabilists. We intend to continue to invite women to speak and to seek speakers from other underrepresented groups. The meetings will have four featured talks, two on Thursday morning and two on Friday morning. Thursday and Friday afternoons will be set aside for informal sessions where participants will be encouraged to give ten-minute presentations of their recent work or to discuss open problems. The proposed areas of coverage for this year's conference include Brownian motion, local times, Markov chains and processes, random structures and algorithms, particle systems, and stochastic analysis.
Specialized mathematical meetings like this are very important. They give people an opportunity to exchange ideas and try out new theories. They also give young people an opportunity to question experienced mathematicians. Regional meetings are especially important because it is easy to follow up on significant conversations. They also foster the sense of belonging to a group of active researchers---in this case the Northeast Probability group
is a two day seminar held in November in New York City. It rotates between NYU, CUNY and Columbia. Specialized mathematical meetings like this are very important. They give people an opportunity to exchange ideas and try out new theories. They also give young people an opportunity to question experienced mathematicians. Regional meetings are especially important because it is easy to follow up on significant conversations. They also foster the sense of belonging to a group of active researchers---in this case the Northeast Probability group. Our meetings have generally included an equal number of junior and senior mathematicians, about 45 of each. At each of the three meetings we had four featured talks by both well established and promising probabilists, who spoke in the morning. The afternoons are set aside for informal sessions where participants are encouraged to give ten-minute presentations of their recent work or to discuss open problems. This grant was used to pay for the travel and local expenses of the four principal speakers, and to provide funds for the partial support of travel and local expenses of participants without grant support. The Northeast Probability Seminar is an open meeting which has always tried to further the NSF goal of increasing participation of women and members of minority groups in research in the mathematical sciences.
