They came together this week to share their knowledge of data analysis tools in a three-week school sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"The biggest drawback of living in an information age is the need to easily extract meaningful facts and features from the enormous collections of data, computer networks and audio and video streams that bombard us every day," said Kevin Vixie of Los Alamos' Mathematical Modeling and Analysis Group.
Vixie chairs the organizing committee for the graduate summer school, "Intelligent Extraction of Information from Graphs and High Dimensional Data." The school is scheduled to run from today (July 11) through July 29 at UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and will include classes and talks by six Los Alamos researchers and dozens of other experts in the fields of feature identification, pattern discovery and analysis of high-dimensional data.
A few spaces remain available for the summer school, which is intended for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and senior researchers working in related mathematical fields. Vixie added that classes are clustered so that a different set of topics is covered each week:
o July 11-15 -- High-dimensional data, relational data and kernel methods;
o July 18-22 -- Image analysis and machine learning; and
o July 25-29 -- Streaming data and networks.
More information is available at http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/gss2005/ online. Those interested in attending should send an electronic mail to Allon Percus, the associate director of the Institute, at percus@ipam.ucla.edu as soon as possible.
Examples of major applications for the mathematical tools under development at Los Alamos and other institutions are facial and voice recognition systems, spectral and hyperspectral image analysis, tools for building more robust networks, intervention strategies for epidemics, data mining techniques, and analysis methods for social and transactional networks.
"The emphasis on acquiring data and building data networks has outpaced our ability to distill data and make it useful to researchers and to the average citizen," Vixie said. "This summer school will provide a rare opportunity for the mathematical community, as well as mathematically oriented scientists and engineers, to learn about current research directions in this area and their suitability for a wide range of socially valuable applications."
Among conference speakers are Los Alamos researchers Tom Asaki of the Continuum Dynamics Group, Rick Chartrand of Mathematical Modeling and Analysis Group, Larry Schultz of Los Alamos' Subatomic Physics Group, Ingo Steinwart of the Modeling, Algorithms and Informatics Group, James Theiler of the Space and Remote Sensing Sciences Group and Vixie.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.