The full name is IMA New Directions Short Course Applied Algebraic Topology. It is run in the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications located on campus of the University of Minnesota.

I attended another IMA short course in 2004. The course was called Computational Topology and it changed the direction of my research. Until then my interests were in algebraic topology and fixed point theory. After the course I became convinced that algebraic topology would have serious industrial applications. It took me another year to find my personal interest - digital image analysis.

The main focus of the current course will be on how algebraic topology can contribute to methods of data analysis. This topic is of special interest to me as I am also working on image-to-image search applications.