Below are the summer schools and workshops sponsored by MathFIT during 2001-02. Text is included to give a flavour of the events.
"This workshop, organised by The OR Society's Local Search Study Group, aims to bring researchers and practitioners together in an informal and mutually supportive environment to discuss the current, and future, state-of-the art in local search techniques as well as how these developments relate to commercial practice. Local search techniques to be covered will include tabu search, evolutionary algorithms, constraint satisfaction and ant systems; and local search applications will include scheduling and rostering, frequency assignment, vehicle routing and logistics, time-tabling, location problems and cutting and packing problems."
Contact: Dr Celia Glass, City University
Date: 16-17 April 2002
"The heading 'random structures' is intended to cover both the finite (random graphs, partial orders, etc.) and infinite (configurations of some physical model on an infinite lattice). Our aim is to bring together combinatorialists, probabilists, physicists and theoretical computer scientists to engage in an interdisciplinary meeting that will study random structures from various directions. There will be two linked workshops: Combinatorial and computational aspects of statistical physics and Random graphs and structures. The overarching theme that unites these two is that of phase transition, broadly interpreted. A rough distinction between the two workshops might be that the first deals with phase transitions in infinite systems (e.g., the Ising model on the 2-dimensional square lattice), and the second with 'phase transitions' in finite structure (e.g., random graphs or random partial orders). However, this distinction is certainly not intended to be a hard-and-fast. Computational questions - such as the extent to which phase transitions may coincide with the boundary between tractable and intractable - will certainly be addressed."
Contact: Professor Mark Jerrum, Edinburgh University
Date: 26 August - 6 September 2002
Computational, statistical and mathematical modelling in biology
"The aim of the workshop is to stimulate new cross-disciplinary interactions between mathematicians, computing scientists and biologists. This aim is to be achieved by providing a meeting ground where new ideas can be exchanged, and new contacts established. The meeting will bring together PhD students and leading researchers in the ares of computing science, statistics, mathematics and computational biology. Mathematically and statistically minded students will be introduced to open research questions in different biological application areas and shown the techniques currently being apllied or developed for their solution; computing scientists will deeepne their understanding of applied mathematical and biological research issues; and biologists will learn novel techniques which might become crucial to their future research."
Contact: Dr Ela Hunt, University of Glasgow
Date: 2-6 September 2002