Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Conference on Applied Inverse Problems

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This proposal seeks funding for junior researchers to attend the large, biennial meeting on mathematical inverse problems; the Applied Inverse Problems (AIP) conference. The meeting will be held on the campus of Texas A&M University, May, 23-27, 2011. There will also be a pre-conference workshop, specifically tailored to give graduate students and postdocs critical background material. As expected from the conference title, there is an emphasis on applications and most talks will be motivated directly by questions in the physical, biological and engineering sciences. This makes this a "not-to-be-missed" meeting, especially for the junior researcher, and this proposal seeks travel funding to permit graduate student and postdoc attendance. This will have significant broader impact as it exposes US junior researchers to state-of-the-art applications and mathematical techniques in a rapidly expanding area that has considerable technological importance for the health, economic welfare and security of the nation. AIP-2011 is the sixth in a series of biennial meetings that are intended to be the comprehensive scientific conference for the area of inverse problems in partial differential equations and applications. In addition to the 12 plenary talks, there will also be approximately 40 minisymposia plus contributed sessions and poster sessions. The intent of the meeting is to achieve a balance among analysis, computation and modeling for applications.The field of inverse problems has grown enormously within the last decade. While the underlying model may be a partial differential equation, mathematical, computational and statistical tools are required that go far beyond this basis. One consequence of this is the demand put on a researcher to have broad-based expertise and this particularly impacts beginning researchers. For example, imaging is a ubiquitous tool in the modern world and the mathematical models arising from various modalities give rise to inverse problems. While the familiar CAT scan comes from the Radon transform and gave rise to the field of (x-ray) tomography, modern imaging is extremely complex. It not only uses different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (which have very different absorption and resolution properties) but also can involve longitudonal waves such as sound, or as is now common, hybrid versions to optimize against the twin evils of diffusion and lack of resolution. While many of these methods have differential equations as their basis, reconstruction techniques require intensive computational analysis and statistical methods to optimize data use. Even this sub-field has become so broad that no one individual can be expert on all aspects. For this reason AIP-2011 will feature a pre-conference workshop primarily intended for graduate students and postdocs that will take place immediately prior to the main meeting. The workshop will feature 10 talks from 5 well-known experts and will cover many of the basic tools that will be required for an understanding of the more in-depth talks of the meeting itself. These include analytic/geometrical methods, Baysian techniques, inverse scattering, regularization techniques and tomographic methods in imaging. Funding from this award will also allow attendance at the workshop and this in itself will have a broad educational impact in an area that is critical for the technological growth of the nation.