IPAM
Annual Newsletter of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics a National Science Foundation Math Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles
Fall 2010
IPAM Promotes Mathematics of the Mind As a groundbreaking cognitive scientist, Josh Tenenbaum gets to his share of scientific meetings. But for Tenenbaum, associate professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the programs of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics are distinct from the rest.
“Most of the conferences I attend aren’t at math institutes” Tenenbaum says. “The study of human behavior and human thought isn’t typically viewed as a mathematical field, but that is where we’re trying to take the field of psychology. We would like to make it into a formal science – to give it the explanatory power, precision and rigor that are enabled by math.”
Photo: Len Rubenstein
The opportunity to run cognitive science programs at a mathematical institute that draws interdisciplinary groups of top faculty and students continues to be an attractive proposition for Tenenbaum. In January 2005 he organized “Probabilistic Models of Cognition: The Mathematics of Mind,” a week-long IPAM conference that brought together leaders from cognitive science with experts from computer science, mathematics and statistics interested in establishing bridges to the cognitive science field. In 2007 he organized a three-week summer school follow-up. Next summer Tenenbaum will organize his third IPAM program, this one lasting two weeks. All three programs, like Tenenbaum’s research, are at the interface of multiple fields: probability theory and statistical inference, structure and representation, symbolic logic and grammar. The programs draw a diverse group that includes statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists and philosophers. “It’s very exciting to be able to bring such a wide range of people together at IPAM,” Tenenbaum says.
Josh Tenenbaum Associate Prof. in Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Five More Years of NSF Support!
Inside FEATURES Meaningful Connections Made Through IPAM 2 Functional Genomics 10 Years Later 3 Intro to New Board of Trustees Chair, Al Hales 4 Searching Chemical Compound Space 8 REGULARS Director’s Note News & Notes Donate to IPAM Upcoming Programs Call for Proposals
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The NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences has renewed IPAM’s grant for another five years (through August 31, 2015) with a substantially increased budget. This will enable IPAM to continue its current portfolio of programs, and to support some important additional activities. Former IPAM organizers and participants who met with the NSF site visit evaluation team last fall made a significant difference in IPAM’s Tony Chan (President, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) will be giving a public lecture at IPAM’s 10th Anniversary Conference. For more information and to register, please visit: www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/ann2010
renewal. The site visit report was extremely positive with comments such as this: “IPAM is doing a terrific job of meeting its mission of impact in mathematics and its applications. Thoughtful configuration of programs has supported the development of new research networks and scientific breakthroughs.” To celebrate its continued NSF support, IPAM will hold its 10th Anniversary Conference on Nov. 2-4, 2010. Speakers from academia, government and industry will present research results related to programs from IPAM’s first ten years. Two public lectures by Tony Chan and Josh Tenenbaum and a panel discussion will provide an overview of interdisciplinary mathematics and science and IPAM’s role in this exciting endeavor. n
Note from the Director
Russel Caflisch
I’m happy to welcome you to IPAM’s second annual newsletter, which comes at the end of a busy and successful year. Our most important news is that the NSF has renewed IPAM’s main institutional grant for another 5 years. This renewal included a significant increase in IPAM’s funding, which will be used to fund summer schools, a series of exploratory workshops and a general expansion of IPAM’s programs. I want to express a big thanks to IPAM’s staff for their efforts in securing this renewal and to a number of IPAM “alumni” who participated in the site visit leading up to the renewal. A few other notable items from the past year: Our summer undergraduate research program RIPS has expanded to a new location in Berlin, in addition to the ongoing versions in Los Angeles and Beijing; the summer program on Network Analysis for the Humanities was a great success; IPAM cosponsored a workshop on bone tissue modeling; Al Hales agreed to serve as the new Chair of the Board of Trustees; and a renovation project added three new offices to IPAM’s building. The year that’s upon us will contain long programs on Optimization (fall) and Chemical Compound Space (spring). Also this fall, IPAM is sponsoring a series of workshops on Machine Reasoning at the behest of the Office of Naval Research. A notable special event will be the 17th Annual Conference for African-American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS) in June 2011 at IPAM. IPAM’s first program was held ten years ago - in fall 2000. A celebratory conference in November 2010 at IPAM will mark this anniversary, with a series of outstanding research talks, a panel discussion, and two public lectures. I want to extend my personal invitation to all of you to attend IPAM’s 10th Anniversary Conference. n
Meaningful Connections Made Through IPAM Alethea Barbaro is an Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCLA. From my research on interacting particle systems, in particular using these systems to model social dynamics, it is clear to me that the behavior of a system changes as you vary the number of particles. This is widely known and expressed by terms such as group mind or “mob mentality.” In physical systems, you can consider this in terms of phase transitions. Take, for example, the gas and liquid phases of an element. In a gas, the particles are very far apart, and there are very few interactions among them. In the liquid phase, particles are packed more densely, so interactions are more frequent and the element behaves differently. Much of the behavior of the element is determined by the number of interactions among particles. This analogy also extends to mathematicians. We are by nature fairly solitary individuals, and, other than in a university math department, it is uncommon to meet other mathematicians in our daily lives. But, when such interactions do occur, the ensuing discussions often impact and inspire our research in ways that an individual cannot do alone. This is why IPAM is so valuable. IPAM is the liquid environment which brings us together and
In collaboration with Lincoln Chayes and Maria D’Orsogna, Alethea is using an approach from statistical mechanics to explore the idea that graffiti can influence the formation of gang territories. Here, there are two gangs, red and blue. The figures indicate the the temporal evolution of red and blue territories.
gives us the opportunity to make important and long lasting connections with other mathematicians. The workshops and long programs are designed to make mathematical magic happen. IPAM encourages interactions between mathematicians and scientists interested in the same topic, and these connections spark other connections which spark others, and so on. I first experienced IPAM at the Swarming by Nature and by Design workshop in the spring of 2006. There, I met Andrea Bertozzi, who is now one of my postdoc advisers. Together, we organized the Agent-Based Complex Systems workshop at IPAM in the fall of 2009. Through my active participation in the long programs, Optimal Transport (Spring 2008) and Quantum and Kinetic Transport (Spring 2009), my network expanded from southern California to across the globe. Subsequently, I have been invited to numerous conferences and Continued on p. 7
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Functional Genomics: 10 Years Later When the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics held its inaugural program in 2000, the program’s organizers had no idea what to expect. As it turned out, “Functional Genomics,” held on the UCLA campus from September 18 through December 15, 2000, was an unqualified success – drawing prominent mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and biologists from academia and industry, as well as students, postdoctoral fellows and junior researchers. In many ways, the three-month program set the tone for the success of IPAM, which will host a followup in the fall of 2011, “High-Throughput Genomics.” Among the participants in the 2011 program will be individuals whose careers were greatly influenced by their experience with IPAM a decade ago. “It was amazing that people came,” says Mark Green, IPAM director emeritus and UCLA professor of mathematics, of the 2000 program. “Given that we had no track record, the people who came as long-term participants in that first program were incredibly brave and adventurous.” Green remembers going to USC for a meeting with members
of the organizing committee – Kenneth Lange, Simon Tavaré, Michael Waterman and Wing Wong – to discuss how the program should be focused. They settled on gene expression arrays, later known as microarrays. At the time, these expression arrays represented an important new tool in the burgeoning genomics field, making it possible to simultaneously measure the expression level of thousands of genes in a collection of cells. “This was a dynamic subject that had many interesting mathematical problems with little that was definitively resolved,” says Green. “It was a wide-open field.” The decision proved prescient: The program was held at precisely the moment that interest in microarrays was exploding. Leaders in the new field agreed to participate, and workshops at IPAM’s first program quickly reached capacity. Continued on p. 6
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Mathematics of the Mind Tenenbaum studies the computational basis of human learning and inference. The work has applications to artificial intelligence and the ability to build computational systems that more closely mimic human learners; instead of trying to build intelligent machines, though, Tenenbaum’s group seeks to understand the mind and the brain as a kind of machine that produces intelligence. Through a combination of mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments, Tenenbaum’s studies aim to uncover the logic behind humans’ everyday inductive leaps – from constructing perceptual representations and inferring causal connections to learning concepts and words. “Much of my research is trying to understand how the mind learns about the world in ways that go beyond what we can currently get machines to do,” Tenenbaum says. “We’re trying to not just come to a better understanding of how the mind works, but also to enable smarter, more human-like machine learning systems.” “Josh has been a leader in causing a minor revolution in the way people address cognitive science,” says Alan Yuille, professor of statistics at UCLA, who organized the 2005 and 2007 IPAM programs with Tenenbaum. “He and his collaborators have had a major influence by bringing in more mathematically complex techniques than have been traditionally applied in these areas.” Tenenbaum’s IPAM summer programs, which focus on building probabilistic models of cognition, also serve to train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the emerging field. “These are individuals who have spent years in one school with a small
number of faculty, which inherently offers a narrow slice of one particular field,” Tenenbaum notes. “When they are exposed to this broader group, it’s a real eye-opener. If they’re coming from math or computer science, they see these great problems in psychology and cognitive science that they can work on. If they are from psychology or the study of cognition, they see these techniques in math and computation that can be used for our problems. It’s a meeting of the minds that hasn’t happened anywhere else at the same scale as it has at IPAM.” The IPAM experience is equally fruitful for faculty, Tenenbaum notes, by providing an opportunity to influence a new generation and to meet graduate students and postdocs who can serve as collaborators. That has been the case for Tenenbaum: Most of the postdocs currently in his group are people he met while running the IPAM summer school in 2007. In many cases, these were students who had been focused on mathematical work in machine learning until the IPAM experience exposed them to the possibility of applying math to problems in psychology and cognitive science. For example, Noah Goodman became Tenenbaum’s postdoc after they met at the 2005 workshop, then went on to be a speaker in the 2007 summer school and is now headed to a faculty position in the psychology and computer science departments at Stanford. “IPAM has shown great vision in treating the study of the mind as a field of applied math, and it’s really paid off,” Tenenbaum says. “I am very grateful to IPAM for recognizing the potential and helping us develop our field in this way.” n IPAM Newsletter Fall 10 • 3
News and Notes Infinite Possibilities Conference held at IPAM On March 19-20 2010 in partnership with Building Diversity in Science, IPAM sponsored the 2010 Infinite Possibilities Conference (IPC), a national conference designed to promote, educate, encourage and support minority women interested in mathematics and statistics. Almost 200 high school, college, and graduate students, postdocs, professors and professionals attended. The conference featured talks by Suzanne Weekes (WPI), Ivelisse Rubio (University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras), and Ruth Gonzalez (ExxonMobile) and offered panel discussions and research talks, a poster session, math activities for high school students, mentoring activities, and an awards banquet. The day before the conference, Bill Massey (Princeton) organized a short course on operations research for graduate students attending IPC. Videos of some talks and panels are available at www.ipam.ucla.edu/videos.aspx.
Nobel Laureate David Gross Speaks at IPAM
On February 22, 2010, Dr. David Gross, Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave a stimulating talk entitled “The Coming Revolutions in Fundamental Physics” to an audience of about 300. Dr. Gross reviewed the present state of knowledge in elementary particle physics and discussed the experimental revolutions that might occur at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He gave a clear and compelling description of the state of string theory. In 2004, Gross was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for solving the last great remaining problem of the “Standard Model” of the quantum mechanical picture of reality.
Trenberth Gives Global Warming Talk
On May 5, 2010, Kevin Trenberth gave an IPAM public lecture entitled “Global Warming: Coming Ready or Not!” Dr. Trenberth is Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Change reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He presented results from climate models that show that the human influence on climate has exceeded the natural variability since 1970. This public lecture was part of IPAM’s long program, “Model and Data Hierarchies for Simulating and Understanding Climate.”
RIPS Goes to Berlin
IPAM’s successful summer program Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) had a new location this year. IPAM and its German partners MATHEON and the Berlin Mathematical School debuted RIPS-Berlin this summer, with undergraduate students from the U.S. and Europe participating in four industry-sponsored research projects, including proteomics fingerprinting, coarse graining complex biological networks, photogrammetric correction of microscopic images of photonic crystal fibers, and surface optimization using graphics cards. IPAM continued its RIPS programs in Beijing and Los Angeles this summer as well.
IPAM Hosts Digital Humanities Program
Scholars in applied math, computer science, and humanities disciplines convened at IPAM in August 2010 for a two-week summer school entitled “Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities,” which introduced participants to the computational tools for the discovery and analysis of networks. Tim Tangherlini (UCLA Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Scandinavian Section) won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) award to support the program and served as the lead organizer. The program featured lectures and tutorials from some of the leading scholars in network analysis and visualization, as well as an opportunity for participants to experiment with software on test datasets.
Alfred Hales Chairs IPAM Board of Trustees
IPAM is pleased to announce that Alfred W. Hales has agreed to serve as chair of IPAM’s Board of Trustees. Dr. Hales is a distinguished mathematician – a recipient of the Polya Prize and a newly elected Fellow of the AAAS – who has a very broad perspective on pure and applied mathematics. He has served as Chair of the UCLA Mathematics Department, Director of the Center for Communications Research (CCR) - La Jolla and member of the Board of Trustees of MSRI. Recently, the Hales-Jewett Theorem, derived by Alfred Hales and Robert Jewett and concerning the degree to which highdimensional objects must necessarily exhibit some combinatorial structure, has received a huge amount of attention due to its use in an alternative proof of the Green-Tao Prime Progression Theorem. IPAM welcomes his expertise and experience to the Board.
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IPAM News: www.ipam.ucla.edu/news.aspx. Videos of Public Lectures: www.ipam.ucla.edu/videos.aspx.
RECOGNITION RIPS Student Receives Fulbright
Dan Butler (RIPS 2008) received a Fulbright grant to perform research at Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 2010-2011. He will help develop mathematical image modeling techniques for art restoration, specifically restoration of Chinese calligraphy. Dan participated in RIPS as an undergraduate student; he was a member of the Areté team. After graduating from Brown University in 2009 with a degree in applied math and computer science, he spent a year at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.
RIPS Students Wins Award at Minority Student Conference
At the Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS), held in Phoenix last fall, RIPS 2009 participant Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling (Placental Analytics team) was one of two winners of the Oral Presentation Award in Physical Sciences and Mathematics category. He credits RIPS with helping him develop confidence and an accessible, professional style. Benjamin and his RIPS teammates Kyle Heuton and Chenyu Yang also presented a poster of their research at the SGI (Society for Gynecological Investigation) Annual Conference in the spring.
2010 SIAM Fellows Recognized
The Class of 2010 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Fellows includes Andrea Bertozzi, Susanne Brenner, Tony Chan, Bjorn Engquist, Ioannis Kevrekidis, and Fred Wan – all of whom have served on an IPAM board or as an organizer for an IPAM program. Many other SIAM fellows participated in IPAM programs as speakers or participants. The new Fellows were recognized at the Prizes and Awards Banquet at the SIAM Annual Meeting on July 13, 2010.
Congratulations to 2010 AAA&S Fellows
On April 19, 2010, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S) announced its 2010 Fellows, which include leaders in the sciences, social sciences, the humanities, the arts, business and public affairs. IPAM wishes to congratulate those fellows who have served as director, organizer, board member, and speaker at IPAM, as well as participated in IPAM long programs and workshops: Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA), William Goddard (Caltech), Mark Green (UCLA), Andrew Majda (NYU Courant Institute), Mary Wheeler (University of Texas at Austin), and Maciej Zworksi (UC Berkeley). The new class will be inducted on October 9, 2010, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS November 2-4, 2010. Have you heard? IPAM’s turning 10! Join us for IPAM’s Tenth Anniversary Conference. Tony Chan (HKUST) and Josh Tenenbaum (MIT) will give public lectures. February 10, 2011. program.
Application deadline for RIPS summer undergraduate
February 24-26, 2011. Female graduate students and recent PhDs in math, join us for the Women in Mathematics Symposium. Applications due Jan. 3, 2011. June 1-4, 2011. IPAM will host the 17th Annual Conference for African American Researchers in Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS). n
Support IPAM IPAM’s mission is to make connections between a broad spectrum of mathematicians and scientists, to launch new collaborations, to better inform mathematicians and scientists about interdisciplinary problems, and to broaden the range of applications in which mathematics is used. We seek the support of friends who share our vision and are willing to help to forward it. Your donation will help us to enhance IPAM’s activities, for example:
Improvement to our Facilities. IPAM recently built three new offices to allow for larger long programs. We want to continue to improve our facilities by replacing old furniture, renovating the kitchen, and upgrading our videorecording equipment. These enhancements will help us serve our participants and the greater math community better.
Diversity Programs. IPAM sponsors a variety of activities to encourage women and minorities to study mathematics and pursue careers in math. We need your support for specific diversity programs we will sponsor in 2011, including the Women in Mathematics Symposium and the Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS).
Support for RIPS. RIPS is one of the only math research summer programs in the country open to international students. We also offer RIPS programs in China and Germany, and are considering other locations, allowing U.S. students to work side-by-side with students from another country. RIPS students are introduced to a multicultural work environment while also gaining research experience in industrial math. Your support will help us continue and grow these programs. Please help IPAM carry out its mission by making a contribution with the enclosed postage-paid envelope or online at: www.ipam.ucla.edu (click “Donate”).
IPAM Newsletter Fall 10 • 5
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Genomics
Green believes the ability to choose the right topics and the right people has continued to be one of IPAM’s greatest strengths. “We have always been willing to take risks, and that became our hallmark,” he says. “It would be easy to run programs and take approaches that were tried-and-true, but we have done the opposite: try to determine what will be cutting-edge at a given moment and move in that direction.” The risks have paid off by placing IPAM ahead of the curve time and time again, starting with the 2000 program. At that program, for example, a tutorial taught by Timothy Triche of USC showed how microarrays could be used to classify tumors that pathologists couldn’t distinguish. The week of IPAM’s first
UPCOMING PROGRAMS 2010-2011 Long Programs
Modern Trends in Optimization September 13 - December 17, 2010 Navigating Chemical Compound Space for Materials and Bio Design March 14 - June 17, 2011
2010-2011 Short Programs
IPAM’s 10th Anniversary Conference November 2 - 4, 2010 Algorithmic Game Theory January 10 - 14, 2011 Efficiency of the Simplex Method January 18 - 21, 2011 Random Media: Homogenization and Beyond January 24 - 28, 2011 Women in Mathematics Symposium February 24 - 26, 2011 Mathematics of Information-Theoretic Cryptography February 28 - March 4, 2011 17th Annual Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences June 1 - 4, 2011
2011 Summer Programs
Research in Industrial Projects for Students June 26 - August 26, 2011 Graduate Summer School: Probabilistic Models of Cognition July 6 - 16, 2011
2011-2012 Long Programs
Mathematical and Computational Approaches in High-Throughput Genomics September 12 - December 16, 2011 Computational Methods in High Energy Density Plasmas March 12 - June 15, 2012
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renewal site visit five years later, The Economist published an article on how this ability to tell tumors apart with microarrays was a major new trend in medicine. “Functional Genomics,” like many of IPAM’s programs, had a major influence on many of its participants. Xianghong Jasmine Zhou, now an associate professor in USC’s Program in Molecular and Computational Biology, came to IPAM as a postdoctoral fellow that fall, having just completed her Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “I knew almost nothing about microarrays before that program,” Zhou says. “At IPAM I gained the basic knowledge and got to know many people in the field. Microarray gene expression analysis became my major area of study.” Wong, one of the organizers of the 2000 program and an organizer of next year’s program, would serve as Zhou’s postdoctoral adviser. Zhou also met Haiyan Huang, now an assistant professor of statistics at UC Berkeley, with whom she has consistently collaborated for the last decade. “You meet so many people as well as gaining exposure to the topic,” says Zhou, who is organizing the 2011 program’s cancer genomics workshop. “Three months is a great period of time for getting to know people, starting projects and making some progress. Many of us stayed in touch long after that program ended.” As an organizer of the 2000 program, Lange was himself influenced by the content: Eric Siggia’s talk about a problem in DNA sequence analysis known as motif finding piqued Lange’s interest and led him to conversations with his faculty colleague Chiara Sabatti. Lange and Sabatti subsequently wrote several papers on the topic. Although he has many demands on his time in his current role as chair of UCLA’s Department of Human Genetics, Lange looks forward to spending whatever time he can at the 2011 program. “It’s always profitable to attend conferences of this sort, because you’re hearing the latest research in a very friendly forum,” he says. “It’s a very effective format for meeting people and exchanging ideas.” In many ways, the 2011 program underscores how far the genomics field has come in barely more than a decade. The microarray technology that was so revolutionary in 2000 is being replaced by rapidly advancing high-throughput sequencing technology. Whereas the key question in 2000 was how to make use of the new gene expression chips, the issue now is how to store and make sense of the ever-expanding flow of data, and how to make use of the growing number of datamining tools in genomics. “These new sequencing technologies are going to change what’s possible,” says Green. “The time is ripe to do this program.” As in 2000, IPAM will be ahead of the curve. Except that this time, says Green, “it’s much easier to get good people, because we have a track record.” n
Board of Trustees
Call for Proposals IPAM seeks program proposals from the mathematical, statistical and scientific communities for long programs, winter workshops, summer programs and affiliate workshops. Proposals are reviewed by IPAM’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) at its annual meeting in November. To receive full consideration, please discuss your program ideas with the IPAM director or associate directors immediately, and send your proposal to Director Russ Caflisch, at director@ipam.ucla.edu, by October 1, 2010.
Winter workshops
are typically five days in length, with 20-25 presentations. The SAB will consider proposals for winter 2012 at its November meeting. The proposal should include a short description of the mathematical and scientific content, names of individuals to serve on the organizing committee, names of individuals that you would like to invite as speakers or participants, and consideration of other sources of funding.
Summer schools
are generally 2-3 weeks in length and incorporate both tutorials (a series of 3-4 talks) and research talks illustrating applications. They are directed toward graduate students and postdocs. It is usually necessary to have a supplemental source of funding. The requirements for summer school proposals are comparable to those for winter workshops. The SAB will consider proposals for summer 2012 at its November meeting.
Long programs
generally have two complementary streams: one mathematical and one (or more) from other related scientific disciplines where there is the potential for a fruitful and exciting interaction. A long program opens with tutorials, followed by four one-week workshops and a culminating workshop at the UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference Center. The proposal should include the names of senior and junior participants (faculty, postdocs, graduate students and industry representatives) you would like to invite. A long program proposal template is available on the IPAM website, under the “Programs” link. Proposals for academic year 2012-2013 will be reviewed at the next SAB meeting. IPAM also provides partial funding for affiliate workshops, held at IPAM or at the site of the co-sponsor. The standards are comparable to those for any IPAM workshop. Proposals are considered at any time. Continued from p. 2
Connections
workshops in Europe and the East Coast and formed several collaborations. All of these successes are a result of my attendance at one IPAM workshop in 2006.
David Balaban, Amgen Tony Chan, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Mark Green, University of California, Los Angeles Alfred Hales, Chair, Center for Communications Research (CCR) West Sallie Keller-McNulty, Rice University William Massey, Princeton University Juan Meza, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Cleve Moler, MathWorks Incorporated Jeff Saltzman, Merck Research Laboratory Ron Stern, University of California, Irvine Pieter Swart, Los Alamos National Laboratory Tatiana Toro, University of Washington
Science Advisory Board
Mark Green, University of California, Los Angeles Matthew Hastings, Los Alamos National Laboratory Peter W. Jones, Chair, Yale University Yann LeCun, New York University David Levermore, University of Maryland Jill Mesirov, Broad Institute, MIT & Harvard Assaf Naor, New York University Richard Schwartz, Brown University Terence Tao, University of California, Los Angeles Elizabeth Thompson, University of Washington Claire Tomlin, University of California, Berkeley Stephen Wright, University of Wisconsin
IPAM Directors
Russel Caflisch Director Amber Puha Associate Director Christian Ratsch Associate Director Stanley Osher Director of Special Projects
Newsletter
Editor/Designer David Wu Contributors Stacey Beggs, Dan Gordon, Christian Ratsch
Currently, I am mentoring graduate students on how to use interacting particles, together with geographic and behavioral information, to model social dynamics. Additionally, I am working as a RIPS mentor for IPAM, advising undergraduate students on a joint project with the LAPD in which we fill in missing data in records of gang crimes in Los Angeles. IPAM has not only provided me with the opportunity to meet other mathematicians and scientists, but it has also propelled my career in a very exciting and successful direction in a short amount of time. I am grateful to IPAM for the amazing and rewarding experiences the Institute has afforded me and I look forward to what the future and IPAM have to offer. n
Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics
a National Science Foundation Math Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles 460 Portola Plaza Box 957121 Los Angeles, CA 90095 p: 310-825-4755 f : 310-825-4756 www.ipam.ucla.edu IPAM Newsletter Fall 10 • 7
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Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics
a National Science Foundation Math Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles 460 Portola Plaza Box 957121 Los Angeles, CA 90095 p: 310-825-4755 f : 310-825-4756 www.ipam.ucla.edu
IPAM Program Navigates Chemical Compound Space Many technological challenges of the 21st century would greatly profit from new materials that are tailored to fulfill desired functions. Such materials would have a wide range of applications, including highly efficient energy materials, stronger composite materials, more efficient catalysts, and others. Similarly, much of modern pharmaceutical research deals with drug discovery of small compounds that have been specifically designed for biomolecular functions. Chemical Compound Space (CCS) is the set of all possible configurations of atoms which encompasses all possible compounds. This high-dimensional set needs to be explored in the quest for new materials or biomolecules. Traditionally, this is mostly done either in combinatorial screening experiments by trial and error, or in simulations using statistically trained empirical models based on intuition, a.k.a. quantitative structure-property relationships (QSPRs). Recent advances of computers, algorithms, and computational atomistic sciences, however, have opened the door for first principles modeling as a promising way to more efficiently navigate and explore CCS. Due to the combinatorial nature of CCS, systematic screening of many interesting properties, or even the simple enumeration of compound candidates, is beyond any computational capacity. However, exploring CCS with first principles methods provides a natural framework in which to construct rigorous mathematical tools for the systematic generation of direct and inverse QSPRs. Diverse scientific areas are involved, which benefit from historically grown experimental insights as well as advances made in theoretical and computational sciences. They include statistical mechanics, liquid and solid state physics, quantum chemistry, graph theory, molecular physics, condensed matter physics, biophysics, optimization algorithms, data mining, statistical analysis, and others. IPAM’s long program on this subject, to be held in spring 2011, will bring together senior as well as junior researchers from these diverse scientific communities. The program will be comprised of four distinct workshops. The first and third workshop will focus on design of drugs and biomolecules, and design of materials, respectively. The second workshop will deal with mathematical foundations and discrete optimization problems. Physical frameworks for navigating CCS will be the theme of the fourth workshop. An overall goal of the program is to spark interdisciplinary collaborations that would bring new mathematical insights to optimization and design problems for CCS. n