Simon Fraser University

Optimization problems with sparsity enhancing norms have helped enable the tremendous success of computational compressed sensing techniques in the past decade, where the goal is to recover a signal from a small number of measurements. In this...

The West Coast Optimization Meeting (WCOM) has a long tradition as a regional meeting bringing together scientists working in optimization and related areas. This will be third time SFU has hosted this meeting. Last year's meeting at UBC featured 8...

SageMath is free and open-source mathematical software which started in 2004. Its features cover many aspects of mathematics, from basic arithmetic and calculus to advanced research mathematics in algebra,mcombinatorics, numerical mathematics...

In many applications one wishes to minimize an objective function that is not convex and is not differentiable at its minimizers. We discuss two algorithms for minimization of nonsmooth, nonconvex functions. Gradient Sampling is a simple method that...

Error bounds, which refer to inequalities that bound the distance of vectors in a test set to a given set by a residual function, have proven to be extremely useful in analyzing the convergence rates of a host of iterative methods for solving...

The Cahn-Hilliard equation models the motion of interfaces between several phases. The underlying energy functional includes a potential for which different types were proposed in the literature. We consider smooth and nonsmooth potentials with a...

What do toothpaste, paint and glaciers have in common? All three fluids usually behave like a plastic solid, but as soon as the stress exceeds a critical threshold, they suddenly begin to flow like a viscous liquid. Rheologists refer to such...

The idea of this event is to offer graduate students in Statistics and Actuarial Science with an opportunity to attend a seminar with accessible talks providing them an introduction to active areas of research in the field. For three students from...

Computer simulations of the dynamics of complex systems have become an integral tool of science and engineering. Large scale numerical models of systems evolving over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales are routinely encountered in a variety...

A spectral method for the solution of integral and differential equations is generally understood to be an expansion of the solution in a Fourier series. Chebyshev polynomials are often the preferred basis set for many problems. In kinetic theory...