Inverse Problems: Recent Progress and New Challenges (08w5065)

Objectives

We believe that a workshop that brings key players in analytical approaches and computational methods together with practitioners of inverse problems will be extremely timely and have the potential of huge impact. Our goals are:

* To bring together leading researchers from both the pure and applied side of inverse problems, and encourage interdisplinary collaboration.

* To increase the awareness of new mathematical breakthroughs to the applied community.

* To bring to the attention of the theoreticians interesting new problems and help define mathematical structures yet to be understood.

To accomplish our goals, we plan to take advantage of the BIRS facility and propose the following format for the workshop: The workshop will feature

(1) Tutorial lectures,

(2) Problem posing,

(3) Contributed talks.

Tutorial lectures will feature prominent speakers who will give an overview (not necessarily of their own work) of a topic. Examples: uniqueness in conductivity determination, differential geometric methods in inverse problems, Carleman estimates in inverse problems, stability estimates in inverse problems, computational approaches, graph-cut methods, regularization methods, Bayesian approach.

We will carefully select a list of candidate speakers who will pose inverse problems from novel applications. Examples: vibro-thermography, magnetic resonance elastography, vibro-acoustography, diffuse optical tomography, advanced photolithography. Contributed talks will feature recent development that will be presented in a self-contained short (30-minute) format. We will also encourage submission of posters.

As organizers, we will take the responsibility of acting as facilitators in knowledge transfer. It is hoped that this workshop will bring new problems, and new collaborations to the mathematical community. We believe that because the new problems are derived from practice, their solutions will have great immediate impact. Because of the make up of the participants in the workshop, we are convinced that mathematics will play a key role in their solution.