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 workshop is organized by the Centre de recherches mathématiques, along with GERAD, the CIRRELT (Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation) and ncm2, and is sponsored by the MITACS network of centres of excellence. The participants will work in teams, and each team will analyse a problem supplied by a company or a public sector institution. The workshop will provide companies and institutions with mathematical tools for solving problems, and will enable academic researchers and students in applied mathematics to work on real-world problems.

The Montreal workshop is part of a Canadian tradition, since the PIMS Institute, based in Vancouver, started organizing Industrial Problem Solving Workshops around ten years ago. Information on these may be found at

http://www.pims.math.ca/ipsw.

In Toronto the Fields Institute is now organizing similar workshops; more information on the 2008 workshop may be found at

www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/08-09/FMIPW.

The Canadian workshops are modelled on the "study groups" created by Professor John Ockendon at the University of Oxford (cf. the site
www.maths-in-industry.org). The workshop organizers are very grateful to MITACS for providing a grant amounting to approximately half the workshop expenses.