THANK YOU
On behalf of the BIG3 Scientific Organizing Committee, I would like to warmly thank:
- BIG3 speakers - for their excellent, inspiring, and entertaining talks;
- BIG3 audience - for their inquisitive, pertinent questions;
- BIG3 Local Organizing Committee (Giulio, Josquin, Maude) - for their tireless help in preparations to and running of the meeting;
- Conference Unit at APC (Aurelia, Sarodia), and administrative stuff at APC, Sandrine and Didier, and INRIA, Katia, - for their invaluable help with numerous aspects of the organization;
- Yannick for making things deemed impossible happen;
- APC Laboratory and Dept of Physics of Université Paris Diderot for their hospitality;
- Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR) for their support via the ANR-MIDAS'09 project (ANR-09-COSI-009).
Radek Stompor
BACKGROUND
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation have transformed modern cosmology propelling it into high-precision, data-driven science it is today. CMB data analysis has been a cornerstone of this transformation and it continues in this role preparing currently to meet its possibly ultimate challenge as posed by ever-growing in size and complexity forthcoming data sets required by new science goals posed for the field. These include providing key pieces of information about the very early Universe: Gaussianity of the initial conditions, the presence of the primordial gravity waves, as well as constraints on the large-scale structure formation and possibly properties of dark energy. The sophistication of the involved data models is matched by precision levels, which have to be attained to deliver robust detections and result in firm conclusions. The overall challenge is indeed breathtaking and, without a doubt, the success will be only possible if the data analysis effort becomes truly interdisciplinary and capitalizes on the latest advances in statistics, applied mathematics, and computer science - all of which constitute veritable foundations of the contemporary data analysis work.
OBJECTIVES
The workshop will
• highlight the achievements and problems of the CMB data analysis effort to date;
• review recent progress in all areas of these fields of science most relevant for CMB data analysis;
• provide a forum for discussions between cosmologists, applied mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists;
• demonstrate attractions and challenges posed by the CMB for computer scientists and applied statisticians;
and
• provide a crash-course for CMB data analysts in cutting-edge computer science and statistics.
The hope is that the workshop will go beyond an one-off event and that it will not only inform but also instigate fruitful, long-term collaborations.
ORGANIZATION
The workshop will gather a limited number of researchers from all the relevant fields and will include a number of invited mini-review presentations covering all of them as well as contributed talks exploring more specific issues and problems. We invite contributions from computer scientists, statisticians, applied mathematicians, signal processing community, as well as CMB data analysts. See program for more details including a sample of topics of interest and a current schedule. The time will be also left for informal discussions and interactions.
Keynote speakers include:
D. Hand (Imperial College, UK);
H. Simon (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley, US);
G.F. Smoot, (Université Paris-Diderot, France), Nobel Laureate in Physics (2006).
SPONSORS
• The workshop is supported in part by French National Research Agency (ANR) through the ANR-MIDAS'09 project funded under its COSINUS program (grant #ANR-09-COSI-009).
• Additional funds come from Italy via grants allocated to prof. C. Baccigalupi.
• Logistics and organization is provided by the AstroParticule et Cosmologie (APC) Laboratory via its Conference Unit (Cellule de Conference) and its interdisciplinary research group ADAMIS.