Conference: The 9th International Conference on Computational Harmonic Analysis 2026

This project supports a five-day international conference on computational harmonic analysis and its applications, to be held at Vanderbilt University in May 2026 in conjunction with the Shanks Lecture. The meeting brings together researchers in mathematics, optimal transport, machine learning, signal and image processing, and data science to exchange ideas and accelerate progress on problems of national importance, including artificial intelligence, data analysis, and efficient algorithms for complex networks. The conference advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science and by developing a skilled workforce: it features plenary and main lectures, invited and contributed talks designed to engage students and early career researchers. The project broadens participation through open recruitment, travel and lodging support for students and early career researchers. Public benefits include cross-fertilization between theory and applications, open dissemination of slides and materials through the conference website, and community building around emerging techniques that are relevant to federal priorities in artificial intelligence and to the translation of research advances into practical tools. The project organizes ICCHA 2026 as a focused forum on modern computational harmonic analysis, emphasizing fast transforms, sampling and reconstruction in space and time, frames and wavelets on graphs and manifolds, stability and robustness guarantees, and the interface with optimal transport and learning. The program highlights methods for scalable Wasserstein computations, spectral and multiresolution techniques on non-Euclidean domains, and analysis-informed architectures for deep and graph neural networks. The technical goals are to disseminate recent advances, identify unifying principles across these areas, and promote new collaborations that connect mathematical analysis with algorithm design and real-world applications such as imaging, geoscience, and networked systems. Activities include a one-hour Shanks lecture, 50-minute plenary lectures, 40-minute main talks, 30-minute invited talks, and contributed sessions. Participant support prioritizes approximately twenty students and early career researchers for travel and lodging to maximize impact and broaden participation. Materials are shared on the conference website to enable reuse in research and education and to support the translation of methods into practice. 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.