19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

‘

Winter 2013

Volume 5Issue 2

SAMSI is Part of the Mathematics of Planet Earth Initiative and the International Year of Statistics

SAMSI is participating in a world-wide initiative called Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE) 2013. This year-long effort will highlight the contributions made by mathematics in tackling global problems, including natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis; climate change; sustainability and pan-demics. More than 100 academic institu-tions and scholarly societies are part of this initiative.

The goal of MPE2013 is to bring public awareness of the interdisciplin-ary nature of scientific research and how mathematics plays a unique role in facing global challenges. This broad initiative will involve top researchers in fields as diverse as medicine, engineering, and finance, as well as mathematics, to solve some of the world's most challenging problems. Mathematics will also play a role in the solution to long-term issues including security for e-finance, more accurate predictions of natural disasters, the adaptation of interacting ecosystems to change, and the spread of diseases.

Richard Smith, Director of SAMSI, said, "We hear a lot about climate change, but I don’t think the general public ap-preciates the extent to which this is just one of many environmental and ecological challenges facing mankind, or the con-tribution of mathematics and statistics towards understanding and solving these challenges. Here at SAMSI, we have been particularly active in this field with recent programs on such topics as spa-tial statistics, uncertainty quantification and the analysis of massive datasets, all partly motivated by problems of earth and the environment. We are delighted to be participating in MPE2013 which gives us

a wonderful opportunity to showcase these activities for the wider public."

SAMSI will be holding a special two-day workshop entitled, "Dynam-ics of Seismicity, Earthquake Clustering

and Patterns in Fault Networks," October 9-11, 2013 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina as part of MPE2013. The main goal of the workshop is to build and strengthen newly emerging links between active research groups in different scien-tific areas – statistics/probability, math-

ematics, physics, geodesy, seismology and computer science – toward achieving a solid understanding of seismicity patterns and structures and a physical theory for earthquake dynamics. The workshop will highlight the key role of the mathematical sciences in studying seismicity dynamics in relation to properties of faults and the crust as an essential component of this interdisciplinary research endeavor. People interested in finding out more about the workshop can visit the SAMSI website: www.samsi.info.

SAMSI is also a participant in the 2013 International Year of Statistics. The International Year of Statistics (Statis-tics2013) is a worldwide celebration and recognition of the contributions of statistical science. Through the combined energies of organizations worldwide,

Statistics2013 will promote the importance of Statistics to the broader scientific community, business, government data users, the media, policy makers, em-ployers, students and the general public.

There are hundreds of statistical societies, universities, businesses and institutes from around the world that are par-ticipating. All of SAMSI’s main workshops in 2013 are part of the Statistics2013 events.

Earth is a planet with dynamic processes in the mantle, oceans and atmosphere creating climate, causing natural disasters, and influencing fundamental aspects of life and life-supporting systems. In addition to these natural processes, humans have developed systems of great complexity, including economic and financial systems; the world wide web; frameworks for resource management, transportation and health care delivery; and sophisticated social organizations. Human activity has increased to the point where it influences the global climate, impacts the ability of the planet to feed itself and threatens the stability of these systems. Issues such as climate change, sustainability, man-made disasters, control of diseases and epidemics, management of resources, and global integration have come to the fore.

To meet these many challenges,Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 will include programs on

• Weather, climate, and environment• Health, human and social services• Planetary resources• Population dynamics, ecology and genomics of species• Energy utilization and efficiency• Connecting the Planet together• Geophysical processes• Global economics, safety and stability

Other partners from North America and around the world are invited to join. For further details, including information regarding call for proposals, see the website.

of

www.mpe2013.org

SAMSI Features List of Daycare Providers for Visitors and Workshop ParticipantsSAMSI has collected a list of both short-term drop-in daycare facilities, and daycare providers for more long term needs for its

workshop participants and visitors. “It is always difficult to find decent daycare facilities when a person is not from the area,” commented Snehalata Huzurbazar,

Deputy Director of SAMSI, “Our workshop participants and visitors have given us suggestions of places to pass on to newer folks, so we compiled a list to put on our website to make it easier for future visitors to find a place that will take care of their child, making it easier for people to attend our workshops and other activities.”

The page can be found on the SAMSI website under the visitor’s section. SAMSI does not endorse any particular daycare facil-ity and makes no guarantees about any of the places listed. The institute is just passing on suggestions that have come from other visitors.

From the director…Cooperation among institutes and scientific centers seems to

be very much of a theme at the moment. Here at SAMSI, we have just finished a highly successful workshop on Interactive Visual-ization and Analysis of Massive Data, jointly with Foundations on Data Analysis and Visual Analytics (FODAVA), a research center at Georgia Tech. In February, SAMSI is co-organizing a workshop on large climate datasets at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), hosted by NCAR’s own mathematics institute, the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe). While the collaboration with FODAVA is something new, SAMSI has been organizing joint activities with NCAR for many years and we know this will be a well organized workshop in pretty surroundings. We also have two workshops as part of our SAVI program with India – a probability workshop at the Chennai Mathematical Institute in late December 2012, and an environmental statistics workshop at SAMSI in March. The impetus towards such collaborations between different organiza-tions is driven by a strong belief that there are both institutional and scientific benefits to be derived from them.

On a larger scale, 2013 will see two programs that have drawn partners from all over the world. As described on the first page of this newsletter, Mathematics for Planet Earth (mpe2013.org) is a worldwide collaboration to celebrate the role of the mathematical sciences in solving problems related to earth and the environment. This has been a recurring theme in a number of SAMSI programs. (See the SAMSI blog for an account of my personal experience serving on a National Research Council committee looking at national security implications of climate change.) I first learned about the plans for MPE when I got an email from Christiane Rousseau, the former director of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques in Montréal, and the person who

originally conceived of the whole concept. Over the last couple of years there have been several commit-tees organizing different part of the MPE program as well as a couple of workshops at the American Institute of Mathematics, in Palo Alto, and the range of activities has expanded from the US and Canadian institutes to include partners as far away as India, Australia and South Africa. Apart from our Dynamics of Seismicity workshop in October, we are also promoting our workshops on climate datasets and environmental statistics as MPE activities, and in addition, there are two MPE-organized sessions at the AAAS annual meeting in Boston in February – one on “Understanding and Communicat-ing Uncertainty in Climate Change Science” that I have orga-nized, and one on “Mathematics of Tipping Points: Framework, Applications, and Prediction” organized by Mary Lou Zeeman of Bowdoin College. There are also several MPE-related events, including the usual reception organized by all the US math insti-tutes, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) in San Diego in January. If you’re going to either the JMM or the AAAS meeting, please do check out these events.

2013 is also the International Year of Statistics (http://www.statistics2013.org/), which involves statistics organizations from all over the world. SAMSI has designated a number of its events as Statistics2013 activities, and we are hoping to announce a spe-cial event in recognition of the International Year. Please watch our webpage for details!

Richard Smith

Photos from the SAMSI/FODAVA Workshop on Interactive Visualization and Analysis of Massive Data

(L-R) Santosh Vempala (Georgia Tech), Leland Wilkinson (SYSTAT/Northwestern U), Sid Thkur, RENCI.

Gavid Gotz, IBM, getting ready to speak to the group. Haesun Park (Georgia Tech) and Sankar Basu, (NSF).

Directorate:Richard Smith| DirectorThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Snehalata Huzurbazar| Deputy DirectorUniversity of Wyoming/North Carolina State University

Ilse Ipsen| Associate DirectorNorth Carolina State University

Alan Karr | Associate DirectorNational Institute of Statistical Sciences

Ezra Miller | Associate DirectorDuke University

SAMSI Staff: Amarjit Budhiraja | VI-MSS Coordinatorbudhiraj at email.unc.edu

Gordon Campbell | Operations Directorcampbell at samsi.info

Tricia Clinkscales | Program Assistanttlclinks at samsi.info

Rita Fortune | Financial Analystrita at samsi.info

Karem Jackson | Workshop Specialistkjackson at samsi.info

Katherine Kantner | Webmasterkak at niss.org

Cammey Cole Manning | Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Coordinatormanningc at Meredith.edu

Sue McDonald | Senior Program Coordinatorsue at samsi.info

Jamie Nunnelly | Communications Directornunnelly at niss.org

Karen Stone | Program Assistantkaren_stone at samsi.info

James Thomas | Computational Systemshelp at samsi.info

Follow us! @NISSSAMSI

Postdoc Profile: David Lawlor

David Lawlor always knew he would end up in some kind of STEM career. His mother has worked for IBM as a man-ager for corporate citizenship promoting STEM education. His father is a lecturer in the Math department at the University of Vermont. His older brother, Patrick, is a chemical engineer working for Conoco Phillips near St. Louis. David grew up in Essex Junction, a town near Burlington, Vermont, where he played ice hockey through high school.

David went to college at the Uni-versity of Chicago and double majored in mathematics and physics. During his senior year, he made math his primary major with the intention of becoming a math teacher. Around the same time, one of his physics professors emailed him to advertise a position in the Physics de-partment. The professor was a primary investigator (PI) on a the ATLAS tile calo-rimeter, a subdetector project for CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), the organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider. At that time they were assembling the detectors under-ground and needed some people to help commission the detector and write some computer code. David was accepted for the job, and three weeks after graduating he moved to Geneva, where he lived for a year. There were massive amounts of data being generated by the computer simula-tions at CERN which record and visualize explosions of particles that result from the collisions at the accelerator. It was during his time at CERN that David became con-vinced applied mathematics was really the area he wanted to pursue.

After returning to the United States David moved to Michigan to be with his girlfriend, Melanie, who was working on her graduate degree in art history at the University of Michigan. He worked for a small research firm funded by SBIR grants while he applied to graduate programs in applied math. He went to Michigan State for his graduate degree, where his thesis dealt with sparse Fourier transform (SFT) algorithms. The SFT is an algorithm that processes data 10 to 100 times faster than

what is possible with the fast Fourier transform (FFT), the previous fastest tech-nique. The SFT searches for an area of the spectrum that has significant energy and omits those that are sparse. His research applies not only to this year’s Massive Data program but also the LDHD program next year.

David said he first heard about SAMSI when he was reading a research paper in which SAMSI was acknowledged as hosting a workshop that had initiated the research. He went to the website to find out more about SAMSI and dis-covered the organization had postdoc positions, to which he applied as he ap-proached graduation. He was excited to move to the area, having access to many experts in the field at nearby universities and at SAMSI itself.

David is involved with two working groups that are currently using data that Tamas Budavari, an astronomy professor from Johns Hopkins who visited SAMSI in September, provided from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). He said it is really interesting to work with the same data using two very different algorith-mic approaches. “I’m very grateful that SAMSI is able to bring together practicing scientists, statisticians, and applied math-ematicians to work on problems of mutual interest,” said David.

David’s fiancée will be moving to the Triangle in May. Next year, David will spend his time in the Math department at Duke, but will also be very involved with the LDHD program at SAMSI.

Read our Blog at:samsiatrtp.wordpress.com

19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

19 T. W. Alexander DriveP.O. Box 14006Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-4006

For more information about SAMSI programs and workshops, visit SAMSI’s website at http://www.samsi.infoCalendar of Events for SAMSI

SAMSI-NCAR Workshop on Massive Datasets in Environment and ClimateFebruary 13-15, 2013National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO.

Education and OutreachUndergraduate Workshop focused on Data-Driven Decisions in HealthcareFebruary 21-22, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC

SAMSI-SAVI Workshop on Environmental StatisticsMarch 4-6, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC

Education and OutreachGraduate Fellow Poster Session and ReceptionApril 17, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC

Transition Workshop: Data-Driven Decisions in HealthcareMay 9-10, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC

Education and OutreachUndergraduate Modeling WorkshopMay 13-17, 2013Research Triangle Park and Raleigh, NC

Transition Workshop: Massive DatasetsMay 20-22, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC

Summer Program: Neuroimaging Data AnalysisJune 4-14, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC

Summer Program: Modern Statistical and Computational Methods for Analysis of Kepler DataJune 10-28, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC

Education and OutreachIndustrial Math/Stat Modeling Workshop for Graduate StudentsJuly 15-23, 2013Raleigh, NC

Summer Program: LDHD Summer SchoolAugust 11-16, 2013Research Triangle Park, NC