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The gathering of over 4000 researchers who share current knowledge and new results from their own research in the area of stochastics, leads to fruitful collaboration and new scientific contacts. This is what EURANDOM, an international research institute in stochastics and part of TU/e, achieved in the 100 workshops they initiated during the past 11 years. On December 14, the institute celebrates this milestone. “We will surely continue these initiatives; next year there will be an emphasis on workshops organized for and by young researchers,” so tells the director Onno Boxma.
The first workshop took place on November 14, 1998 and was organized by Professor Mike Keane. This and the next workshops hosted many Dutch and even more international researchers. These activities have broadened and strengthened the international position of Dutch stochastics.
Many subjects of recent workshops have great societal relevance. The study of stochastic networks helps answering questions like: in which way do diseases spread and how fast? How do social networks like Hyves develop? What happens if the internet grows twice as big? The study of probabilistic models for production processes on the one hand and for traffic in communication systems on the other hand, showed a huge overlap, in which both areas could learn from the other. Statistical image analysis is of great importance for all kind of medical applications, and workshops on multivariate risk modeling helped understanding and controlling financial instruments for banks.
The milestone will be celebrated on the first day of the 100th workshop, the workshop on “Dynamic Randomenvironments”. Originally motivated by problems in physics, the mathematical investigation of transport in random media has been an active area of research over the last thirty years, rich in surprising effects and in mathematical challenges. Epidemics, genetics, and evolution of competing populations (from biology), catalytic systems, localization of waves, and ageing in disordered systems (from physics), and dynamic random networks (from computer science) are just a few examples where randomness in a medium is the source of interesting new phenomena, not displayed by static random media.
EURANDOM is an international institute, specialized in probability and statistics. The research is fundamental but with an open eye for applications in physics, biology, image analysis, communication and risk management as well as in industry. EURANDOM, part of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at TU/e, has world-wide gained an outstanding reputation through her workshops and extensive postdoc program.