The 2011 IGTC (International Graduate Training Centre) Summit was held as part of the Applied Mathematics Perspectives thematic program at the University of Victoria. There was a poster session, research discussion session where students and experts interacted, and an education session for IGTC students.
Some photos from the Hyperplane Arrangements and Applications conference which took place at UBC Vancouver, August 8-12. This conference was held in honour of Hiroaki Terao.
The PIMS 2011 Fall board meeting was held at the University of Saskatchewan. In addition to the board meeting, board members toured the Canadian Light Source facility.
The School schedule ran 4 days per week to give participants ample time for study, interaction with other students and discovering Vancouver and its surroundings. Many explored the old growth forests at Lighthouse Park and Lynn Canyon and Headwaters Parks on the North Shore. Those who enjoy more strenuous hiking discovered the beauty of the surrounding mountains and ocean on a number of organized hikes. This year we went to the top of Anvil Island which is only accessible by water taxi from Horseshoe Bay. The 2500 ft.
Despite its large sample efficiency, the truncated flat (TF) kernel estimator of long-run covariance matrices is seldom used, because it lacks the guaranteed positive semidefiniteness and sometimes performs poorly in small samples, compared to other familiar kernel estimators. This paper proposes simple modifications to the TF estimator to enforce the positive definiteness without sacrificing the large sample efficiency and make the estimator more reliable in small samples through better utilization of the bias-variance tradeoff. We study the large sample properties of the modified TF estimators and verify their improved small-sample performances by Monte Carlo simulations.
We begin by reviewing various classical problems concerning the existence of primes or numbers with few prime factors as well as some of the key developments towards resolving these long standing questions. Then we put the theory in a natural and general geometric context of actions on affine n-space and indicate what can be established there. The methods used to develop a combinational sieve in this context involve automorphic forms, expander graphs and unexpectedly arithmetic combinatorics. Applications to classical problems such as the divisibility of the areas of Pythagorean triangles and of the curvatures of the circles in an integral Apollonian packing, are given.
The speaker introduces the formal notion of an approximately specified nonlinear regression model and investigates sequential design methodologies when the fitted model is possibly of an incorrect parametric form. He presents small-sample simulation studies which indicate that his new designs can be very successful, relative to some common competitors, in reducing mean squared error due to model misspecification and to heteroscedastic variation. His simulations also suggest that standard normal-theory inference procedures remain approximately valid under the sequential sampling schemes.