The goal of the workshop is to gather industry representatives, academic researchers, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows to work on concrete problems proposed by the industry. The participants will work in teams and each team will analyze a problem supplied by a company or public sector institution. The workshop will provide companies and institutions with mathematical or statistical tools for solving problems. It will also allow academic researchers and students in the mathematical sciences (e.g. statistics, actuarial science, learning algorithms, optimization) to work on real-world problems.
In 2016 the workshop organized by the CRM will be dedicated to finance and insurance. Its main organizer is Professor Thierry Duchesne, from Université Laval. The workshop will also take place within the framework of the Institutes Innovation Platform or IIP (see Page 6 in the Fall 2014 Bulletin du CRM), an endeavour financed by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) and geared towards the development of collaborations between industry and academic researchers in the mathematical sciences.
The Montreal workshop is part of a Canadian tradition, since the PIMS Institute, based in Vancouver, started organizing Industrial Problem Solving Workshops around fifteen years ago. Information on these may be found at
http://www.pims.math.ca/industrial.
In Toronto the Fields Institute has been organizing similar workshops; more information on the 2014 workshop may be found at
www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/cim/14-15/IPSW14.
The Canadian workshops are modelled on the “study groups” that originated at the University of Oxford (cf. the site www.maths-in-industry.org and click here for more information on this type of workshop).