Multifractal Analysis: From Theory to Applications and Back

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Multifractal Analysis: From Theory to Applications and Back " workshop from February 23rd to February 28th, 2014.

Many real-life objects are highly irregular, especially when examined up close. For example, these could be natural, medical or texture images taken at high resolution. They could also be the measurements of a stock price, wind velocity in a turbulent flow or rainfall, showing extremely high irregularity when recorded in time or space. Multifractals are mathematical models capturing and characterizing several forms of such regularity (or irregularity). If fractals are characterized by a single regularity exponent, multifractals are now associated with a range of such regularity exponents. Understanding and knowing the regularity structure of an object could and have been used for classification, model building, testing of hypotheses, and other critical data analysis tasks.

Multifractal analysis is an emerging field that aims to provide tools for the practical analysis and modeling of data exhibiting multifractal properties, and to build a mathematical theory for the underlying phenomenon. It finds its roots and is of growing interest in at least three communities: First, functional analysis and geometric measure theory which are theoretical mathematics, second, probabilistic and statistical modeling, and third, signal and image processing, and applications at large. The goal of the workshop is to gather a selected group of interested experts from these communities in order to foster cross-fertilization and knowledge transfer between the communities, to identify open and key issues in multifractal analysis, and to serve as the starting point of new collaborations to tackle these issues.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).

BIRS Scientific Director, Nassif Ghoussoub
E-mail: birs-director[@]birs.ca
http://www.birs.ca/~nassif