The INFORMS Applied Probability Society (APS) conference is held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia this year.  Leaders in the community will be presenting their outstanding research in plenary lectures, posters, symposia and workshops.

SigOpt is excited to be participating in the Applied Applied Probability workshop this year.  This workshop has been organized by the Centre for Applications in Natural Resource Mathematics at the University of Queensland and features two parallel tracks full of exciting research on modeling applications including energy, health/epidemiology, wildlife conservation and manufacturing.

Michael McCourt, a member of the research team, will be presenting (Google slides) at this workshop, occurring July 2, the day before the APS meeting starts.  The full day workshop takes place at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, itself an architectural marvel for its improvements in sustainability.  This is Mike’s first INFORMS meeting, and he is excited to meet with the broad spectrum of researchers at this workshop to learn more about how probability is applied throughout different fields.

While in Brisbane, Mike was able to have a minor Cornell reunion, meeting up with Matthew Holden (one of the workshop organizers) and Peter Frazier (presenting at the APS session later in the week).  Matt, Mike, and Scott (SigOpt’s CEO) were all PhD students together at the Center for Applied Math, and Peter was Scott’s graduate advisor.  A picture of a night out in Brisbane is provided below.

Additionally, Mike stopped by Sydney for a couple days to meet some old friends in the Monte Carlo community at the MCM conference.  The picture below includes Fred Hickernell, Ian Sloan, Frances Kuo, Josef Dick and Dirk Nuyens.  Mike and Fred are looking forward to a coming collaboration on an open source quasi-Monte Carlo software project.