Conference: NSF Computational Mathematics PI Meeting 2024

The NSF Computational Mathematics (CompMath) PIs’ meeting is the first such event for over a decade and will be held on July 15 and 16, 2024, at the University of Washington in Seattle. The meeting is open to all with interest in CompMath, with a particular emphasis on attracting current and recent PIs of the CompMath program, as well as early career researchers such as junior professors, postdocs, and Ph.D. students working in CompMath. The meeting aims to achieve three primary goals: (1) Community building in CompMath by bringing together the CompMath community to strengthen and expand the network of NSF-supported PIs. Parallel research sessions serve as a platform to highlight the achievements of the PIs and the CompMath program; (2) Engagement of early career scientists through a poster session designed to highlight their works, activities aimed at the professional development of early career researchers, and travel support for these attendees; (3) A forward-looking report will be compiled by the organizers by leveraging community input that presents an overview of discussions during the meeting and summarizes any strategic community recommendations and outcomes from the meeting focusing on the major achievements of CompMath, current challenges, and exciting new research directions. The CompMath disciplinary program at NSF supports a variety of research endeavors, which include more classical foci of numerical analysis, PDE solving algorithms, and mathematical optimization, along with the more recent and/or nascent subfields of randomized linear algebra, computational imaging, and mathematical aspects of data science and machine learning. Investigators from these subfields indeed attend their own discipline-specific conferences and professional events and also take opportunities to attend meetings in related fields. However, there is a dearth of meeting opportunities between a large collection of researchers who focus on the broad collection of foundational research questions in CompMath. Because the community of PIs supported by project awards from the NSF CompMath program does not have targeted events/conferences where the community broadly meets, the main motivation for this proposal is to organize such a professional meeting. The PI meeting will feature focused presentation sessions where PI’s will highlight their NSF-supported work in the previously described technical research areas. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.