DAAD Spring School on Combinatorial Stochastic Processes has opened on March 7, 2016 at VIASM.

The topic of our spring school is “Combinatorial stochastic processes and its applications”. This field studies random permutations and partitions of a large population, and the reverse process, the merging of smaller units into progressively larger communities, called coalescent.

These processes are abundant in nature. In biology, species form a phylogenetic tree. In physics, particles merge or split at atomic levels. In engineering, gas and oil fields come in fragments of different sizes. In computer science, one wants to organize articles by topics, keywords or pictures to help searching and recommendation.

In these applications, scientists often need to infer the partition or coalescent process from limited data. For example, given a collection of articles, one wants to organize them into major topics. Unlike clustering in machine learning, however, the articles may keep coming, new topics appear, and topics may merge overtime. Thus, both the data and the partition and coalescent processes are evolving, often at random.

Combinatorial stochastic processes is precisely the area of mathematics that models such processes. It gives strong probabilistic theorems that allow scientists to do such inferences.

There are six lecturers at the School: two senior professors, three junior professors and one PhD candidate (Ms. Geldhauser) who give the tutorials. Their diverse expertise cover the major topics of combinatorial stochastic processes, which are random trees, coalescent and diffusion processes, geanalogy applications, random partitions, and random graphs. Of the six lecturers, three are women, and four are young researchers, within five years of obtaining their PhD.

The goal of these lectures is to introduce graduate students, scientists and researchers in related fields to the major tools, open problems and applications of combinatorial stochastic processes. The discussion sessions serve as a venue for the participants and lecturer to build a research community, mingle, exchange ideas, and work on open questions.

The School attracts 40 participants from both within and outside of Vietnam, including Mongolia, the Philipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore).

It will last until March 18, 2016. For details program, please visit: http://viasm.edu.vn/hdkh/daad-spring-school-on-combinatorial-stochastic-processes?userkey=chuong-trinh