Research Interaction Teams (RIT)

Spring 2012

See here for last spring's list and here for the fall 2011 list.

RITs ("Research Interaction Teams") are informal groups designed to foster interaction between faculty, students, and postdocs, and to get students interested in current research. Most of them meet as informal seminars with active student participation (and in many cases, student organization as well). Note: RITs were formerly listed on the VIGRE pages. Now that the VIGRE grant has officially ended, they have been moved here.

• RIT on "Aspects of Statistical Mechanics with Applications"
  Organizers: Maria Cameron (Dept. of Mathematics, cameron@math.umd.edu), Ted Einstein (Dept. of Physics, einstein@umd.edu), Dionisios Margetis (Dept. of Mathematics, dio@math.umd.edu), Paul Patrone (Dept. of Physics, ppatrone@umd.edu).
  Meeting Time: Mondays 4-5 PM
  Location: MATH 1308
  Credit: Students may participate without signing up. Students who sign up for credit (1 credit) are expected to attend regularly, pick one topic and develop it into a book report or a seminar presentation by the end of the semester.
  Description: Stochastic dynamics governs a broad range of physical phenomena that occur on small length and time scales under the influence of small thermal noise. Chemical reactions, conformal changes in biomolecules, magnetization switches, and nucleation events in first-order phase transitions are examples of thermally activated processes. Furthermore, stochastic modelshave been applied to such areas as evolutionary biology, theoretical ecology, computer networks, and pricing of financial securities.
  The goal of this RIT is to explore various problems that are modeled using stochastic differential equations (SDE's) or methods of statistical mechanics.
• RIT on Applied Partial Differential Equations
  Organizers: Stuart Antman, Maria Cameron, Sandra Cerrai, Manoussos Grillakis, David Levermore, Doron Levy, Matei Machedon, Dionisios Margetis, Antoine Mellet, Eitan Tadmor, Konstantina Trivisa, Peter Wolfe (lead organizers in bold)
  Meeting Time: 3:00pm - 3:50pm Mondays, starting September 12
  Location: MTH 1311.
• RIT on Weather, Chaos, and Data Assimilation
  Organizers: Kayo Ide, Brian Hunt, Eugenia Kalnay, Takameasa Miyoshi
  Meeting Time: Mondays 2-3:45 starting September 12 (check website for further schedule)
  Location: CSS 4301
  Description: The group studies data assimilation and related problems in the nonlinear dynamics of geophysical systems, from theory to operational applications in areas such as weather forecasting. Activities will include discussion of current group research, presentations by the RIT students, and occasional research seminars by outside experts.
• Student Dynamics Seminar/RIT
  Organizers: James Tanis and Brendan Berg
  Meeting Time: 3:30-5:30 PM Tuesdays.
  Location: MTH 1308.
• RIT on Optimal Learning Applied To Donor Retention In Disaster Relief
  Organizer: Ilya Ryzhov, Dept. of Decision, Operations and Information Technologies, Robert H. Smith School of Business
  Meeting Time: Thursdays 3:00 - 5:00
  Location: VMH 4322
  Participation: By sign-up only; please contact Prof. Ryzhov if you are interested.
  Description: Our research team has won access to a dataset containing detailed historical records and donation histories for over 500,000 Red Cross donors. Typically, after a major disaster such as Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross experiences a spike in one-time donations. The Red Cross would like to turn as many of these one-time donors as possible into recurring donors. Donors are cultivated using a wide variety of communication and marketing strategies, such as different types of mailings. These mailings are extensively categorized in the dataset. The goal is to identify optimal communication strategies that should be used to target donors with particular characteristics. The project has both theoretical and applied dimensions. On the theory side, it is necessary to develop new statistical models and optimization algorithms with strong performance guarantees. Algorithmic rate of convergence results are of particular interest, since they can provide assurance that we can efficiently discover a good communication strategy in a short period of time. The application side will be based on the dataset and will focus on ensuring the computational efficiency and tractability of algorithms, as well as on using them to provide practical recommendations.
• Learning Seminar on p-adic Hodge Theory
  Organizers: Tom Haines, Niranjan Ramachandran
  Meeting Time: 2:00pm - 3:00pm Fridays, starting September 9
  Location: MTH 1311.
• Cancer Modeling RIT
  Organizers: Courtney Davis, Amanda Galante, Shelby Wilson, and Doron Levy
  Organizational Meeting: Friday, 12:00 noon, September 2.
  Regular Meeting Time: Fridays, 11:00, starting 9/16.
  Location: CSIC 4122
  Description: For Fall 2011, we will be discussing models from Wai-Yuan Tan and Leonid Hanin's "Handbook of Cancer Models with Applications".