This grant supplies funds to cover shared local accommodations and meals for approximately fifteen US based junior researchers to attend the 2007 AMS von Neumann Symposium "Sparse Representation and High-Dimensional Geometry" being held from July 8th through the 12th, 2007. Junior researcher is defined as a graduate student, or researcher who has received their PhD. during or after 2002. This conference is the first major conference in the USA dedicated to the emerging topic of sparse approximation and as such is expected to play an important role in the development of a cohesive research community. With its relationship to fundamental questions in pure mathematics as well as important implications for information acquisition, sparse approximation has received a great deal of interest from both mathematicians and engineers. The conference will be focused around the themes of: fundamental frameworks for where sparsity is present and can be exploited, application areas and practical considerations, the underlying high-dimensional geometric phenomenon allowing for sparse approximation algorithms to work, the design and analysis of computationally efficient algorithms, and presentations of application results. The conference is truly interdisciplinary, including participants from google and other industries, theoretical mathematicians studying banach spaces, and leading electrical engineers.
This grant supplies funds to allow approximately fifteen US based junior researchers to attend the first conference in the USA dedicated to sparse approximation; for details of this conference see "www.ams.org/meetings/vonneumann07.html." This topic concerns the development of mathematical tools to simplify large data sets, through the construction of good approximations which are as parsimonious as the data allows. These tools are increasingly important in the modern scientific environment characterized by ever larger data sets. Applications already under investigation include dynamic visualizations of the human beating heart, next generation circuit components for wireless communications, and faster sequencing of biological micro-arrays. Funds from this grant will allow for the rapid training of early stage researchers in this topic, increasing the rate and quality of expected advances in both its theory and application.
