By the routine activity of SIAM PolyU Student Chapter, on 9 Dec. 2014, we are honored to invite Professor Irene Fonseca to give us a distinguished talk "Variational Problems in Materials Science and Image Inpainting".

　In this talk, kinds of physical and technological applications such as analyzing instabilities in materials science and image analysis in computer vision are presented. All techniques shown in this talk can be used to verify short-time existence for a surface diffusion evolution equation with curvature regularization in the context of epitaxially strained films. It is proved that there is no wetting effect for small volumes, and the shapes of quantum dots will be identified. Similar variational models can be used for recolorization of damaged images.

　 Professor Irene Fonseca is the director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Nonlinear Analysis (CNA). The CNA is one of the few centers in the United States that receives significant federal funding for research in applied mathematics. In recognition for her contributions to the advancement of research in her area of expertise, Fonseca was bestowed a knighthood in the Military Order of St. James (Grande Oficial da Ordem Militar de Santiago da Espada) by the the President of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, in 1997. For her teaching and research contributions to Carnegie Mellon University, Fonseca was honored with the Mellon College of Science endowed chair in 2003 and named a University Professor in 2014. In 2012, she was elected President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), one of the largest organizations dedicated to mathematics and computational science in the world.