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 tools for solving problems and allow academic researchers and students in mathematics to work on real-world problems.

The 2015 workshop will 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).