News and Announcements

Peter Jones Terence Tao	April 29, 2008 Congratulations to new NAS Members The National Academy of Sciences announced its new members on April 29, 2008. Among those elected to the NAS include several “friends of IPAM” – former participants, speakers, organizers and board members. The list includes Peter Jones, who has served as chair of IPAM’s Science Advisory Board and as organizer of several workshops and long programs, Terence Tao (foreign associate) who recently joined the Science Advisory Board, and other past workshop speakers and organizers: Steven Boxer, Emily Carter, Kenneth Dill, Thomas Liggett, and Peter Zoller (foreign associate). Congratulations to all!
Anna Lysyanskaya Selim Esedoglu	March 5, 2008 Congratulations to Sloan Fellows, NSF CAREER Award Recipient The Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics wants to congratulate the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Fellows with connections to IPAM, including Inwon Kim (Geometrically Based Motions, Optimal Transport); Xiole (Shirley) Liu (Sequence Analysis Toward System Biology, Search and Knowledge Building for Biological Datasets); Anna Lysyanskaya (Securing Cyberspace: Applications and Foundations of Cryptography and Computer Security); Mauro Maggioni (Multiscale Geometry and Analysis in High Dimensions, Internet Multi-Resolution Analysis); Ben Weinkove (Geometric Flows: Theory and Computation); and Eric Xing (Social Data Mining and Knowledge Building). Congratulations also to Selim Esedoglu (RIPS 2003 and 2004) for winning an NSF CAREER Award from the Division of Mathematical Sciences.
	January 22, 2008 RIPS Mentor Matteo Pellegrini Recognized for New Tools for Genomic Research Matteo Pellegrini, UCLA assistant professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology and IPAM-RIPS faculty mentor since 2002, was featured in the winter 2008 issue of UCLA College Report. Dr. Pellegrini has developed new software tools to help genomic researchers model and interpret large-scale genomic information. The article will be available on http://www.college.ucla.edu/report/.
	January 21, 2008 UCLA Anthropologist Jeff Brantingham Finds Patterns in Crime with Mathematics Professor Brantingham was also featured in the winter issue of UCLA College Report for his mathematical research into crime patterns, in partnership with UCLA mathematicians Andrea Bertozzi and Lincoln Chayes and several southern California police departments. With Assistant Professor Brantingham as the primary organizer, IPAM sponsored a one-week workshop “Crime Hot Spots” in January 2007. The article will be available on http://www.college.ucla.edu/report/.
	January 10, 2008 Plastic Surgeon Court Cutting Presents Lecture on Virtual Surgery On January 9, 2008, New York University Medical Center Surgeon Court Cutting gave a public lecture at UCLA on the use of three-dimensional surgical simulation to model and plan reconstructive surgery on patients with severe facial malformations. The lecture was cosponsored by the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology (CASIT) and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI).
	January 3, 2008 SAGE Organizer/Graduate Student Craig Citro Featured in UCLA Graduate Quarterly PhD Student Craig Citro (UCLA Mathematics) was the subject of a “student profile” in the UCLA Graduate Quarterly magazine, featuring his passion for rock climbing and number theory. Mr. Citro was co-organizer of two IPAM affiliate workshops, called “SAGE days.” Read the article: http://spotlight.ucla.edu/students/craig-citro-math/.
	December 10, 2007 IPAM Organizer Joseph Teran Featured Speaker at IDF 2007 Joseph Teran, who joined the UCLA math faculty this summer and first became involved at IPAM as a RIPS faculty mentor, was a featured speaker at the Intel Developer Forum Fall 2007. As a response to Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner’s keynote address on the 3D Internet, Teran demonstrated the finite element cutter/simulator used in virtual surgery applications. Joseph Teran was chair of the organizing committee for the workshop “Scientific Computing Applications in Surgical Simulation of Soft Tissues,” held at IPAM in January 2008. Dr. Teran and his work were also featured in a UCLA Today article on November 28, 2007: http://www.today.ucla.edu/campus/071128_virtual-surgery/.
	November 30, 2007 Heinz Engl Receives ICIAM Pioneer Prize Heinz Engl of Johannes Kepler Universität Linz and the Austrian Academy of Sciences received the joint Pioneer Prize awarded at ICIAM 2007. The prize honored his contributions to inverse problems, especially in the solution of a wide range of industrial problems. He was also commended for his promotion of mathematics in industrial problems solving worldwide and the founding of RICAM (Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics). Dr. Engl was the chair of the organizing committee for IPAM’s long program Inverse Problems: Computational Methods and Emerging Applications,” held in 2003.
	August 22, 2007 IPAM Takes “RIPS” to China In addition to our annual Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) program held on the UCLA campus, IPAM partnered with Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) to offer RIPS-Beijing in 2007. Ten U.S. and ten Chinese undergraduate students worked on cross-cultural teams on five projects sponsored by MSRA research groups, including “Semi-supervised Support Vector Machine for Relation Extraction,” “Maximum Mutual Information Partition for Confidence Measures in Speech Recognition,” “Stochastic Modeling and Analysis of Broadcast Algorithms,” “The Disktop: A Hyperbolic Task Manager,” and “Analysis of PageRank Computation Methods and Induced Webpage Ordering for Google Matrices.” The students spent eight weeks in Beijing and presented the results of their research on Projects Day, held on August 23, 2007. IPAM and MSRA hope to offer this industrial mathematics undergraduate program again in the future.
	August 11, 2007 Webcast of “Mathematics of the Mind” Summer School Lectures Available In July 2007, over 200 graduate students, postdocs, professors, and others met at UCLA for a three-week summer school entitled “Probabilistic Models of Cognition: The Mathematics of Mind.” The path-breaking program brought together mathematicians, psychologist, cognitive scientists, and statisticians working on the common problem of how to explain empirical phenomena in the major areas of cognitive science. The lectures are currently available online as video files in Real Player format.