Workshop for Women in Shape Analysis

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This grant supports travel for US women to the Workshop for Women in Shape Analysis (WiShT), to be held at the Nesin Mathematics Village in Istanbul, Turkey, in the week June 5-12, 2016. The workshop is designed to strengthen the shape modeling community by bringing together women researchers at various stages in their careers (from graduate student to senior researcher) and from across the world, to foster research collaboration and mentorship. Because shape modeling is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing from mathematics, computer science, and biotechnology, collaborations are especially crucial. Furthermore, since no single country has many women working in shape modeling, international collaborations are essential to forming robust networks of women researchers. Hosting the workshop in Turkey reflects a conscious effort to make the workshop more accessible for women from the Middle East and Africa. Participants will spend one week working together in small groups to solve one of a selection of open questions in shape modeling. Instead of the more typical workshop structure where participants watch presentations of established results, WiShT participants will begin generating new results in collaboration with other participants. Following the workshop, the research network will be maintained and strengthened by publishing a proceedings volume, establishing a website and listserv, and organizing follow-up conferences and reunions for participants. Mentoring and professional development will happen both formally and informally. For more information about the workshop see http://nesinkoyleri.org/eng/events/2016-wis2/index.phpShape analysis is a critical component in many applications areas, including image recognition, medical imaging, biomedical engineering, graphics, and computer animation. The workshop will tackle three very different challenging problems in shape modeling and analysis in groups led by experienced researchers, and the broad range of participants will allow an interdisciplinary team of scholars to make substantial progress in each area. Group 1 will explore the many possible definitions of shape complexity and will study the relationships between them in the hope of deriving an overarching mathematical theory of shape complexity and an understanding of when each notion of complexity is most appropriate. The second group will focus on combinatorial optimization for shape-based segmentation models, both discrete and continuous. Each model presents challenges: continuous models may not converge to optimal solutions or may be much slower, while in the discrete setting, integrating shape information or targeting structures with a particular predefined prior is quite challenging. Group 2 will combine these approaches by exploring the mapping of variational formulations to the discrete domain and tackle the challenges associated with optimizing the resultant discrete models. Group 3 will focus on convolution skeletons in both two and three-dimensions. The goal is to develop a method to transform an input shape and associated convolution skeleton into a new skeleton that is robust, compact, and reproducible that gives a smooth parameterization of the original shape. Results from each group will be published in an AWM-Springer volume, as well as disseminated via conference and journal publications.