This award is to support an international cooperative project which will organise and run an international workshop on the subject of applied inverse problems at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, UK, 26-30 June, 2005 (www.cs.ac.uk/aip2005/). One of the chairs and five of the organizing committee are from US universities. Support from NSF would be used to assist primarily the participation of graduate students, post-docs and junior faculty who would otherwise not be able to attend from the USA. The project has originated from two previous "Applied Inverse Problem". The first was in Italy in 2001 and the second at Lake Arrowhead, CA USA in 2003. A total attendance of 170 is expected. From the USA, the investigator estimates 15 at full professor level, 20 other faculty and 25 PhD/Postdocs. The workshop will be led by researchers from world-leading centres and will cover a number of theoretical and application areas, both established and upcoming, in a set of specialist ``minisymposia''. The impact thus touches many important disciplines in present-day science, engineering and medicine as well as advancing the boundaries of computational mathematics itself. Application for subsidy will be made available on the workshop website. Recommendations from academic supervisors will be sought and priority will be given according to need and ability. Women, minorities and people with disabilities will be given particular consideration. The requested fund will be used to support only US participants.
The field of inverse problems in the broadest sense is the study of theoretical and practical methods for recovering the properties of physical or mathematical structures from indirect measurements of derived quantities. In recent years the enormous increase in computing power has made it possible to apply the techniques of inverse problems to situations of growing complexity. Applications are very widespread in science, medicine and engineering and include, for example, a number of medical as well as other imaging techniques, location of oil and mineral deposits in the earth's substructure, creation of astrophysical images from telescope data, finding cracks and interfaces within materials, shape optimization, model identification in growth processes and, more recently, modeling in the life sciences. The goal of this meeting is to provide a forum for mathematicians and practitioners working in the theory and applications of such inverse problems and to bridge the gap between research into analytical aspects and their practical, mostly computational, applications. We expect to provide a timely and significant boost to the mathematical and also cross-disciplinary communities in the USA and elsewhere by bringing researchers up to the state of the art. Younger participants will be able to assess current opportunities on a global scale for the next phases of their research careers. The European location will give junior US participants an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with their European (including Eastern European) counterparts. The investigators expect that this will result in new collaborations. In contrast to the traditional meeting pattern of senior invited speakers and contributed papers, the workshop format will allow a comprehensive view of the state of the art, the exploration of current problems and new applications and will encourage new collaborations, both national and international and between academe and industry.
