Why and what for …

This series of half-day-long interdisciplinary mini-workshops is aimed at exploring the interface between statistics, computer science, applied mathematics, and physical sciences, focusing on analysis and exploitation of scientific data sets, methodologies, and techniques. Next-generation observations, ranging from cosmological observatories (the Euclid space mission or the ground-based LSST), through astroparticle observations (Auger, JEM EUSO, or CTA), to post-LHC particle physics experiments, will produce overwhelmingly large and complex data sets, and there is indeed little doubt that solving problems related to analysis and interpretation of these observations and experiments will be only possible if the scientists from different walks of science get quickly better in talking and collaborating together.

We expect that the meetings will provide opportunity for scientists from all these walks of science to talk to each other either in a form of more formal talks and presentations or more informally in follow-up discussions. We hope that this will facilitate more efficient information flow about the latest ideas and developments concerning novel techniques and methods on the one hand and challenges and problems in the application areas on the other. We hope that they will provide physicists with novel perspectives on the problems they face and present statisticians, applied mathematicians and computer scientists  with new exciting and challenging applications in some of the most dynamic and fruitful areas of modern physics and cosmology, which have consistently succeeded in catching imagination of the general public and experts alike. We believe that the meetings will have potential to impact directly and profoundly all the relevant domains of physics and cosmology but also to motivate novel research directions in statistics, applied math or computer science. The workshops will promote interdisciplinary research at its very best serving as a melting pot in which all the diverse ideas could be honed together, resulting in innovative collaborations and projects.

We expect the mini-workshops to be of interest for physicists as well as statisticians, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists, and we warmly encourage researchers from these and other science fields to attend.

How …

Each of the mini-workshops will consist typically of two talks on a common topic, offering two different perspectives, followed by formal and informal discussions. The meetings will be held alternately in Paris and Orsay and advertised well ahead of the time.

The workshops topics will be guided by open questions in the application areas, which will be then matched with some specific areas of and/or developments in the other sciences. Alternately, we also envisage workshops on more general topics from these other sciences, if these are expected to be of more general interest for the application scientist. We will make an attempt to tune both of these approaches to ensure that the presentations are indeed sufficiently focused and directly relevant to problems faced by the physicists, but also general enough to allow for some serendipity.

This is no doubt a tricky balance to maintain and we will rely heavily on the participants for their help and suggestions in selecting presentation topics to ensure that workshops continue to maintain their appeal at all times.

If you have a topic or a speaker to suggest, we look forward to hearing from you. (Please use the contact link provided below).

We are equally eager to hear from:

• physicists, who either would like to learn about some specific topics from these other fields and meet their practitioners, or who grapple with a problem, for which a promising approach may still need to be identified.
• and from statisticians, signal processing, applied mathematics and computer science researchers about new ideas in their respective areas, which they believe are, or can be, of relevance for more general scientific contexts than the ones they have been originally conceived.

By whom …

This series of mini-workshops is organized at the interface of three research groups from three laboratories, AIM, APC, and LAL, of the Ile-de-France region. It will be coordinated by the steering committee composed of B. Kégl (CNRS/LAL), J.-L. Starck (CEA/AIM), E. Chassande-Mottin (CNRS/APC) and R. Stompor (CNRS/APC).

Contact info

Please send e-mail to us here.