János Engländer reports:

The 36th Conference on Stochastic Processes and Their Applications was held on the beautiful campus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, from July 29 to August 2, 2013. There were 250 participants. The international scientific committee was chaired by Steve Lalley (Chicago), and the local organizers were Anne Dougherty, Vanja Dukic, János Engländer, Sergei Kuznetsov, Manuel Lladser and Brian Rider (chair).

At the beginning of the conference David Aldous announced that the 2013 Line and Michel Loève International Prize in Probability was awarded to Sourav Chatterjee of the Courant Institute, New York (see “Members’ News” on page 2 of the September issue or this link).

Named lectures were given by Gérard Ben Arous (Courant, New York University), who gave the Lévy Lecture; Itai Benjamini (Weizmann Institute of Science), who was the Inaugural Schramm Lecturer; Ken Golden (University of Utah), the Bernoulli Society Open Lecture; Neil O’Connell (University of Warwick) the Doob Lecture; Hirofumi Osada (Kyushu University) the Itô Prize Lecture; and Bálint Virág (University of Toronto), who was an IMS Medallion Lecturer. The other plenary speakers were: Zhen-Qing Chen (University of Washington); Ron Doney (University of Manchester); Hugo Duminil-Copin (Université de Genève); Tadahisa Funaki (University of Tokyo); Niels Jacob (Swansea University); Vadim Kaimanovich (University of Ottawa); Jeremy Quastel (University of Toronto); Kavita Ramanan (Brown University); Qi-Man Shao (Chinese University of Hong Kong); Amandine Véber (École Polytechnique); and Ofer Zeitouni (University of Minnesota & Weizmann Institute of Science). Pablo Ferrari unfortunately had to cancel his plenary address.

Balint Virág gave a Medallion Lecture (Photo: János Engländer)

The Inaugural Schramm Lecture was given by Itai Benjamini (Photo: Joseph Migler)

The inaugural Schramm lecture, by I. Benjamini, was in memory of the outstanding Israeli-American mathematician, Oded Schramm, known for the invention of the Schramm–Loewner evolution, who lost his life in a hiking accident in his forties. The Itô Prize Lecture was delivered by the recent winner of the prize, H. Osada. The Bernoulli Society Open Lecture, by K. Golden, was a “public” lecture, aimed at a broader audience; it addressed environmental as well as mathematical problems.

A large number of invited and contributed sessions complemented the plenary talks, and a successful “Early Researcher Panel Discussion” took place on the Tuesday.
According to feedback from the participants, the scientific program was very well received, and those who participated either in the organized Wednesday hike in the Rockies or in one of the “more privately organized” ones, were fascinated by the natural beauties of the conference venue. The conference dinner took place at Hotel Boulderado, a landmark hotel in Boulder.

The meeting was sponsored by IMS, the Bernoulli Society, International Society for Bayesian Analysis, Elsevier, Illinois Journal of Mathematics, National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, US Army Research Office, Department of the US Navy, Microsoft Research, and furthermore by the University of Colorado as well as its Departments of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. All support received from the above agencies is gratefully acknowledged by the organizers.

Beautiful Rockies (Photo: Adriana Ocejo)