[BIC-announce] Stats seminar of possible interest, Thurs 27 Oct 16h00

[Keith Worsley]

Robert Adler is a superb speaker who gave a great not-too-technical talk in 
the `stats of brain map' w/shops here in June '98 and Dec '00.

(Note: The talk by Jonathan Taylor the following day Fri 28 Oct 15h30 at
UQAM, 200 Sherbrooke west, SH-3420, will present more on this topic -see
http://www.crm.umontreal.ca/en/niveau2/index_act.html )

*********** McGILL STATISTICS SEMINAR ********************

Date:    THURSDAY 27 October 2005 at 4:15 pm (16h15).

Place: Burnside Hall Room 1205, McGill University
  805 ouest, rue Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal.

Coffee and Cookies: From 4:00pm (16h00) in the same Room 1205.

Title: FROM STATISTICS TO PROBABILITY VIA GEOMETRY, AND BACK AGAIN

Speaker: Robert J. Adler, Technion, Israel

Abstract

The aim of this talk will be to describe some new and deep results
in the stochastic geometry of random processes.

I shall start by briefly discussing some statistical problems related to
mapping the brain, both the cerebrum (a 3-dimensional object) and the
cerebral cortex, or "brain surface" (a 2-dimensional manifold in
3-dimensional space).

This problem has motivated recent deep results describing
the random geometry of Gaussian random fields on abstract
manifolds, which I shall describe, and relate back to the original
problem. I shall also discuss the connection between these results and the
the classic problem of determining the distribution of the supremum
of a Gaussian process over a general space.

Since Keith Worsley has been the driving force behind the brain mapping
problems, and Jonathan Taylor the source of most of the "recent deep
results" mentioned above, and both are McGillians, there is a strong "coals
to Newcastle" flavour to this talk. However, as a born and bred
Novocastrian, with the call of the coal forever echoing in his ears,
I shall try to add something new by emphasising how mining these rich seams
gives us new ways to look at old problems in the theory of random fields.


Date:    THURSDAY 27 October 2005 at 16:15 pm (16h15).

Place: Burnside Hall Room 1205, McGill University
  805 ouest, rue Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal.

Coffee and Cookies: From 4:00pm (16h00) in the same Room 1205.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Keith Worsley
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University
805 ouest, rue Sherbrooke, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2K6
tel: (514) 398-3842, fax: (514) 398-3899
e-mail: keith.worsley at mcgill.ca, web: http://www.math.mcgill.ca/keith