Hotel "Panorama", "St. Constantine and St. Helena" Resort
July 2, 2012 – July 5, 2012
The conference objective is to present and discuss current achievement in the fields of the Mathematics of Distances and Applications.
The concept of distance is basic to human experience. In everyday life it usually means some degree of closeness of two physical objects or ideas, i.e., length, time interval, gap, rank difference, coolness or remoteness, while the term metric is often used as a standard for a measurement. But here we consider, except for the last two topics, the mathematical meaning of those terms, which is an abstraction of measurement.
Distance metrics and distances have now become an essential tool in many areas of Mathematics and its applications including Geometry, Probability, Statistics, Coding/Graph Theory, Clustering, Data Analysis, Pattern Recognition, Networks, Engineering, Computer Graphics/Vision, Astronomy, Cosmology, Molecular Biology, and many other areas of science.
Devising the most suitable distance metrics and similarities, to quantify the proximity between objects, has become a standard task for many researchers. Especially intense ongoing search for such distances occurs, for example, in Computational Biology, Image Analysis, Speech Recognition, and Information Retrieval. Often the same distance metric appears independently in several different areas; for example, the edit distance between words, the evolutionary distance in Biology, the Levenstein distance in Coding Theory, and the Hamming+Gap or shuffle-Hamming distance.
The conference is dedicated to the broad issue of deeper understanding of Mathematics of Distances and Distance Design for applications.