On Monday, October 31, Lehigh University is hosting a symposium to advance the understanding and usage of probabilistic modeling across science and engineering academia, especially in the U.S. Midlantic region.
Probabilistic modeling provides essential tools for analyzing vast amounts of data that have become available in science, scholarship, and everyday life; increasingly, it is becoming an important skillset for all scientists and engineers.
Organized by Lehigh's Probabilistic Modeling Group, the symposium will gather researchers with expertise in theoretical and applied probability to share experiences from different fields of science and engineering. According to organizer Dr. Paolo Bocchini, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh, the symposium will also underscore the probabilistic approach as a pillar of scientific curricula at all academic levels.
"Three keynote speakers from different scientific fields will be on hand to make the case for probabilistic modeling," says Bocchini, who leads an interdisciplinary, NSF-funded Lehigh project at Lehigh entitled Probabilistic Resilience Assessment of Interdependent Systems(PRAISys). "All of them are renowned leaders in the theory and application of these techniques."
Keynote speakers include:
- After a remarkable career at UC Berkeley, Dr. Armen Der Kiureghian is now President of the American University of Armenia and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, among many other honors. With his students -- leaders in their own rite across academic and professional institutions worldwide -- he has contributed greatly to the development and adoption of probabilistic tools for safety and reliability analysis in engineering practice.
- Dr. Jeffrey Rosenthal is an award-winning Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Toronto, where he received his tenure at the record age of 29 for his outstanding scientific accomplishments. His bestselling book Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities was published worldwide in sixteen editions and ten languages. Dr. Rosenthal has also dabbled as a computer game programmer, a musical performer, and improvisational comedy performer.
- Dr. Katja Lindenberg is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. She was Interim Director of the Institute for Nonlinear Science and Chair of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCSD. She is currently Director at the BioCircuits Institute, and Executive Editor of the journal Fluctuations and Noise Letters (World Scientific). Dr. Lindenberg is a world-renowned expert in the field of stochastic processes and statistical mechanics.
The symposium will also include a panel discussion and question/answer session on the future of research and education in probability.
The symposium is FREE for all the participants, yet registration is required by October 25, 2016. Lunch will be provided. Although not required, all researchers and students who register are encouraged to bring a poster describing their research work in probabilistic modeling and to share their approach and results with other attendees.
The symposium will be held in the Wood Dining Room of Iacocca Hall, on Lehigh's scenic Mountaintop campus, 111 Research Drive, Bethlehem, PA 18015. For more details and to register, please visit http://www.lehigh.edu/probability/symposium/index.html.
