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The Ninth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop is organized jointly by the Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM) and the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO). The workshop will gather representatives from industry, academic mathematicians, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. Participants will work in teams, each of which studying a concrete problem submitted by a company or a public or quasi-public institution. One of the goals of the workshop (IPSW) is to provide companies and institutions with mathematical tools for solving problems. An IPSW also allows professors and students in the mathematical sciences (including data science, statistics, optimization, mathematical finance, natural language processing, etc.) to analyze and solve real-world problems. The organizers view the workshop as an “incubator” of collaborations and hope that the work initiated during the workshop will lead to collaborations lasting several months or years.

The Montreal workshop is part of a Canadian tradition, since PIMS (the Canadian institute based in Western Canada) started organizing such workshops twenty years ago (see www.pims.math.ca/industrial). In Toronto the Fields Institute is also organizing problem solving workshops (see for instance the site of the workshop that took place in August 2016). The Canadian workshops have been designed on the model of the “study groups” pioneered by the University of Oxford (see www.maths-in-industry.org). The CRM, the FI, and PIMS take turns organizing “national” workshops: the CRM and IVADO are proud to host a national workshop in 2019.