The conference "Random Structures and Limit Objects", to be held on September 15-16, 2012 at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York University, will use the occasion of the 60th birthday of David Aldous to bring together a diverse group of eminent experts and new researchers, with the aim of discussing and making progress on some of the most pressing research questions in probability theory and related areas. Special emphasis will be laid on fields influenced by David Aldous's works, such as exchangeability and graph limits, mixing time of Markov chains and their deep connections with critical phenomena in statistical physics and computer science, extreme value theory and Poisson approximation, random trees and critical random graphs, stochastic coagulation and fragmentation models, phylogenetics and biological models of evolution and the notion of local weak convergence and combinatorial optimization.
The conference will feature eight talks over a span of two days, with additional short talks by junior researchers and graduate students. Specialized mathematical meetings like this are important since they give people an opportunity to young researchers to exchange ideas and try out new theories and interact with some of the pre-eminent thinkers in the field. This conference will be an open meeting and will be advertised in the Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, on the Web, and through a number of electronic mailing lists. A conference website will also be maintained. The slides of the talks will be made available at the conference website. If possible, we will also collect some of the core questions and ideas that arise in the conference and publish this in survey form in an open access probability journal such as Probability Surveys.
" that was held at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, on September 15 and 16, 2012. The organizers, consisting of the PI and some of his colleagues, chose the year 2012 to coincide with the sixtieth birthday of one of the pre-eminent figures of modern probability theory, David Aldous. Professor Aldous, of the University of California at Berkeley, has been instrumental in shaping many deep results of probability theory during the last thirty years. The impact of his research is felt far and wide in the field. The conference brought together a team of highly regarded researchers whose works have been influenced by the contributions of Professor Aldous: Professor Steve Evans from the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Frank Kelly from the University of Cambridge, Professor Jean-Francois Le Gall and Professor Vlada Limic from the University of Paris, Professor Charles Newman from New York University, Professor Giorgio Parisi from the University of Rome, and Professor Yuval Peres, head of the theory group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. These eminent scholars spoke about various aspects of their current research, which comprise some of the most exciting new developments in probability theory. The NSF funding was used to support travel and lodging for the speakers and a large number of graduate students and young researchers. The conference gave the opportunity to the younger audience to interact with the luminaries. The talks were interspersed with lengthy coffee breaks to give ample time for such interaction to take place. This was stated in the grant proposal as one of the main goals of the conference, and the conference was highly successful in this regard. The sign-in sheet shows that the conference was attended by at least 56 participants, of which at least 24 were students or postdocs, many of whom were supported by NSF money. The attendees came from a wide spectrum of universities in the United States and abroad, as well as from the world of corporate research such as Bell Labs and Microsoft. The organizers took care to ensure diversity among the participants: one of the main speakers and three members of the scientific advisory committee were women. Additionally, a sizable number of the younger attendees consisted of women.
