The Virtual Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (VI-MSS)

The Virtual Institute of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences is a new partnership that connects two of the US Mathematical Sciences Institutes (SAMSI and ICERM) with several mathematics and statistics institutes in India: The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), the Indian Institute of Science (IIS), The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). VI-MSS will sponsor joint workshops, research visitors and graduate educational activities with support from the US National Science Foundation. It is part of a broader NSF initiative known as SAVI (Science Across Virtual Institutes - http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/savi/program.jsp).

As part of this initiative, SAMSI announces three new activities:

A workshop on Astrostatistics was held at SAMSI during September, 2012, and brought together astrophysicists and statisticians to brainstorm on advanced topics in statistical inference in the context of modern empirical astrophysics. The program for the workshop is here.
A workshop on Topics in Probability will be held December 18-20, 2012, at the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI). This workshop will consist of twelve to fifteen one hour lectures spanning a broad range of topics of current interest in Probability. We expect that approximately half of the speakers will be from U.S. Universities and the other half from Universities in India. More information can be found here.
A workshop on Environmental Statistics will be held at SAMSI on March 4-6, 2013, bringing together leading researchers from both India and the US. More information can be found here.

For US researchers planning to work in India: In addition to the above, we invite applications from US participants to take part in research visits to India. Research visits may be up to six months in duration for the purpose of extended research collaboration with a faculty member at one of the participating Indian institutes. To be considered for a research visit during the 2012-2013 academic year, please send a letter of application to vi-mss@samsi.info including a CV and a description of the proposed visit.

For Indian researchers planning to work at SAMSI: We also have opportunities for Indian researchers--graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty-- to come to SAMSI for periods of up to several months to participate in SAMSI research programs. Funding for such researchers is provided through the Indian partner institutions named above. Researchers who are interested in applying should first make arrangement with the applicable Indian institution and then submit an application to SAMSI through: http://icerm.brown.edu/vi-mss-participation.

Further queries about any of these activities may be sent to Richard Smith, Director of SAMSI (rls@samsi.info), or Dr. Amarjit Budhiraja, VI-MSS coordinator (budhiraj@email.unc.edu).

VI-MSS Steering Committee

SAVI Participant Logos

Jill Pipher, (ICERM)
Govind Menon, (ICERM)
Richard Smith, (SAMSI)
Amarjit Budhiraja, (SAMSI)
R. Balasubramanian, Director, (IMSc Chennai)
Rajeeva Karandikar, Director, (CMI Chennai)
G. Rangarajan, (Dept of Mathematics IISc Bangalore)
Bimal Roy, Director, (ISI Kolkata)