I spent two weeks attending lectures (three every weekday!). It was the IMA New Directions Short Course Applied Algebraic Topology at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications at the University of Minnesota. The main focus was on how the methods of algebraic topology can contribute to data analysis. I am quite certain that there is a big future here (in fact, I’ll add article Topological data analysis to the wiki soon). Sensor networks, robotics, and dynamics were also discussed.

The main link with all the lectures is this: http://www.ima.umn.edu/2008-2009/ND6.15-26.09/. Another good site is due to Gunnar Carlson, one of the organizers. It is called TMSCSCS: Topological Methods in Scientific Computing, Statistics and Computer Science. A lot of interesting preprints here as well as jPlex, the software that actually does the computations that we discussed. There is also a Wikipedia article. A Google group was formed by the participants.

I am working on a paper that will summarize my views on this stuff, as it fits both data analysis and computer vision…

Next for me is the WORDCOMP conference in Las Vegas, July12-17. I’ll be giving a talk at IPCV’09, International Conference on Image Processing, Computer Vision, and Pattern Recognition. It will be based mainly on the last paper of mine.