The second International Conference on Continuous Optimization will be held at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in August 2007. The Conference will be preceded by a two-day Summer School, where several distinguished scholars will offer classes on selected topics in continuous optimization for advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The goal of the Conference is threefold: (a) to provide a focused forum for US and international researchers and practitioners to facilitate the rapid exchange of state-of-the-art results and promising ideas within continuous optimization, (b) to offer educational opportunities to graduate students and junior researchers to learn about the latest developments in continuous optimization, and (c) to encourage women and minority researchers to work in this important area of Operations Research and Computational Science. This project is supported by the Operations Research Program of the Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation Division, and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
Optimization has evolved over the past four decades into a thriving discipline that has strong theoretical underpinnings and plays a major role in many practical application areas. As the need for improved operation of many physical and scientific systems arises, the role of optimization techniques is growing quickly. The conference will provide a stimulus for sustained research in continuous optimization, while the summer school will have a particular emphasis on high-performance computational optimization. Beyond the application specific domains, broader impacts include the exploration of how large-scale continuous optimization will affect and be affected by cyber-infrastructure and multi-core networked computing.
