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Vision and Strategy for the AFOSR Mathematics, Information and Life Sciences Directorate

Wednesday, January 26, 10:30AM – 11:30AM
POB 6.304

Frederica Darema

The directorate's mantra "Excellence in Science with Transformative Impact to the Air Force, and DOD more broadly" is enabled through strategic investments addressing fundamental questions across the intellectual frontiers of mathematics, information sciences and life-sciences. Today, the field of information sciences has joined mathematics and physics as the disciplines with profound and pervasive impact across all other science and engineering fields.

Likewise, life-sciences has evolved, from a field for understanding the basic principles and mechanisms for governing life, to a field where understanding the rich and wide range of capabilities and mechanisms in biological systems, and how harvesting this knowledge can lead to advanced engineered systems.

It is in these contexts that the directorate's individual programs and broader thematic areas bring together in synergistic and unifying ways the power of mathematics, information sciences, and life sciences, to support research advancing the frontiers in many critical areas: in modeling complex and dynamic systems, in computational and communications systems, in cyber-systems and cyber-security, in studying biological systems in their multiple scales and functions, from sub-cellular and cellular networks to human networks, and understanding and exploiting their foundational characteristics and properties. The directorate's scope of research creates opportunities for building bridges and collaborative activities across the AFOSR directorates, the Air Force Research Laboratories, other governmental agencies as well as other sectors, in particular the international research communities and industrial research; all these, driven and implemented through a stellar group of Program Managers.

This talk will address opportunities within individual research areas and across five broad thematic areas: InfoSymbiotic Systems - The power of DDDAS - Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems; Multicore-based Systems - From the High-Computing to the Real-Time Data-Acquisition and Control systems; Systems Engineering - Engineering Systems of Information; Science of Networked Systems - Discovering Fundamental Principles across Diverse Classes of Network; and Understanding the Brain and the Mind - From Cellular Networks to Human Networks.