Clemson Mathematical Sciences Hosts Multiple Conferences

June 27, 2017

Clemson Mathematical Sciences hosted several conferences and workshops recently, including Operations Research Week, the 31st Clemson Mini-Conference on Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms, the Shannon Centennial, and the joint Clemson/UGA seminar.

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Clemson University’s Operations Research Week was held from April 5–7, 2017 in Martin Hall and Freeman Hall. It was jointly organized by Akshay Gupte from Mathematical Sciences and Cole Smith and Burak Eksioglu from Industrial Engineering. Three hour-long research talks were given by the following invited speakers:

– Daniel Bienstock (Columbia University, NY)

– Arie Koster (RWTH Aachen, Germany)

– Jeff Linderoth (University of Wisconsin-Madison).

The purpose of the event was to officially launch and kickstart activities of the Clemson Operations Research Institute (CORI). This is a newly-formed institute that assembles faculty and students that are distributed across campus but active in the areas of mathematical optimization and stochastic processes. Besides the talks, the OR Week also included some social events and research discussions in breakout rooms. About 40 faculty and students from across campus participated in the activities, which were supported by the departments of Mathematical Sciences and Industrial Engineering.

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The 31st Clemson Mini-Conference on Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms was held Friday October 21, 2016. It was organized by Clemson faculty members Michael Burr, Neil Calkin, Wayne Goddard, and Svetlana Poznanovik, and held in Clemson’s Hendrix Center.

The mini-conference had six invited talks and a poster session. The invited speakers were:

Megan Bernstein, Georgia Institute of Technology

Albert Bush, Georgia State University

Eva Czabarka, University of South Carolina

Drew Lipman, Clemson University

Jacques Verstraete, University of California San Diego

Xingxing Yu, Georgia Institute of Technology.

The mini-conference had forty registered attendees, from ten different institutions, and several non-registered participants and was supported by the NSA.

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The Shannon Centennial at Clemson was part of a series of events financed by the IEEE Information Theory Society taken place around the world to celebrate the life and influence of Claude Shannon on the hundredth anniversary of his birth on 30 April 1916. Shannon is best known for developing the mathematical foundations of communication, data compression, digital computers, cryptography, circuit complexity, flow networks, and juggling, as well as laying foundations of artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction. The list of events can be found at the page http://www.itsoc.org/resources/Shannon-Centenary.

At Clemson University the event took place on December 2, 2016 and involved the seminars of two world renown researchers:

– Emina Soljanin from Rutgers University, and

– Frank Kschischang from University of Toronto.

The event has been principally founded by the IEEE ITSoc together with the RTG grant on Coding Theory, Cryptography and Number Theory and the Holcombe Department of ECE. Local organizers were Felice Manganiello, Gretchen Matthews, Shuhong Gao and Michael Pursley and had an approximate attendance 25 researchers. For more information please visit the link https://www.math.clemson.edu/ccnt/research/shannon-centennial-at-clemson/

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The joint Clemson/UGA seminar was held this year on Thursday, April 13. This year’s speaker was Dr. Brian Williams of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He spoke on Gradient-Free Construction of Active Subspaces for Dimension Reduction.

Dr. Williams is contributing to the development and implementation of statistical methods for the design and analysis of experiments, focusing on the technical areas of sequential optimization, global sensitivity analysis, model calibration, predictive maturity assessment, and rare event inference. Most recently, he worked on the design and utilization of uncertainty quantification tools and methods for nuclear and weapons engineering applications. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

The joint Clemson/UGA seminar has been held between the UGA Department of Statistics and our department since 1973. Previously it was held twice a year, so this year was the 69th joint seminar. Past speakers include Ingram Olkin, Malay Ghosh, Pranab K. Sen, Steve Stigler, Ray Carroll, Ed George, George Casella, John Stufken, Richard Davis, Jianqing Fan, Steve Marron, Marie Davidian, Kathryn Chaloner, Jim Berger, and David Ruppert.

This year’s seminar had approximately 60 attendees from the UGA Department of Statistics and the Clemson departments of Mathematical Sciences, Civil Engineering, and Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences. The seminar was partially funded by Clemson’s Mathematical Sciences Department.