Alistair I. Mees – författare

'Optimization Day' (OD) has been a series of annual mini-conferences in Aus­ tralia since 1994. The purpose of this series of events is to gather researchers in optimization and its related areas from Australia and their collaborators, in order to exchange new developments of optimization theories, methods and their applications. The first four OD mini-conferences were held in The Uni­ versity of Ballarat (1994), The University of New South Wales (1995), The University of Melbourne (1996) and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1997), respectively. They were all on the eastern coast of Australia. The fifth mini-conference Optimization Days was held at the Centre for Ap­ plied Dynamics and Optimization (CADO), Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Western Australia, Perth, from 29 to 30 June 1998. This is the first time the OD mini-conference has been held at the west­ ern coast of Australia. This fifth OD preceded the International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA) held at Curtin Uni­ versity of Technology. Many participants attended both events. There were 28 participants in this year's mini-conference and 22 presentations in the mini­ conference. The presentations in this volume are refereed contributions based on papers presented at the fifth Optimization Days mini-conference. The volume is di­ vided into the following parts: Global Optimization, Nonsmooth Optimization, Optimization Methods and Applications.

All models are lies. "The Earth orbits the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus" is false, but accurate enough for almost all purposes. This book describes the current state of the art of telling useful lies about time-varying systems in the real world. Specifically, it is about trying to "understand" (that is, tell useful lies about) dynamical systems directly from observa­ tions, either because they are too complex to model in the conventional way or because they are simply ill-understood. B(:cause it overlaps with conventional time-series analysis, building mod­ els of nonlinear dynamical systems directly from data has been seen by some observers as a somewhat ill-informed attempt to reinvent time-series analysis. The truth is distinctly less trivial. It is surely impossible, except in a few special cases, to re-create Newton's astonishing feat of writing a short equation that is an excellent description of real-world phenomena. Real systems are connected to the rest of the world; they are noisy, non­ stationary, and have high-dimensional dynamics; even when the dynamics contains lower-dimensional attractors there is almost never a coordinate system available in which these at tractors have a conventionally simple description.

All models are lies. "The Earth orbits the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus" is false, but accurate enough for almost all purposes. This book describes the current state of the art of telling useful lies about time-varying systems in the real world. Specifically, it is about trying to "understand" (that is, tell useful lies about) dynamical systems directly from observa­ tions, either because they are too complex to model in the conventional way or because they are simply ill-understood. B(:cause it overlaps with conventional time-series analysis, building mod­ els of nonlinear dynamical systems directly from data has been seen by some observers as a somewhat ill-informed attempt to reinvent time-series analysis. The truth is distinctly less trivial. It is surely impossible, except in a few special cases, to re-create Newton''s astonishing feat of writing a short equation that is an excellent description of real-world phenomena. Real systems are connected to the rest of the world; they are noisy, non­ stationary, and have high-dimensional dynamics; even when the dynamics contains lower-dimensional attractors there is almost never a coordinate system available in which these at tractors have a conventionally simple description.

All models are lies. "The Earth orbits the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus" is false, but accurate enough for almost all purposes. This book describes the current state of the art of telling useful lies about time-varying systems in the real world. Specifically, it is about trying to "understand" (that is, tell useful lies about) dynamical systems directly from observa­ tions, either because they are too complex to model in the conventional way or because they are simply ill-understood. B(:cause it overlaps with conventional time-series analysis, building mod­ els of nonlinear dynamical systems directly from data has been seen by some observers as a somewhat ill-informed attempt to reinvent time-series analysis. The truth is distinctly less trivial. It is surely impossible, except in a few special cases, to re-create Newton's astonishing feat of writing a short equation that is an excellent description of real-world phenomena. Real systems are connected to the rest of the world; they are noisy, non­ stationary, and have high-dimensional dynamics; even when the dynamics contains lower-dimensional attractors there is almost never a coordinate system available in which these at tractors have a conventionally simple description.

''Optimization Day'' (OD) has been a series of annual mini-conferences in Aus­ tralia since 1994. The purpose of this series of events is to gather researchers in optimization and its related areas from Australia and their collaborators, in order to exchange new developments of optimization theories, methods and their applications. The first four OD mini-conferences were held in The Uni­ versity of Ballarat (1994), The University of New South Wales (1995), The University of Melbourne (1996) and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1997), respectively. They were all on the eastern coast of Australia. The fifth mini-conference Optimization Days was held at the Centre for Ap­ plied Dynamics and Optimization (CADO), Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Western Australia, Perth, from 29 to 30 June 1998. This is the first time the OD mini-conference has been held at the west­ ern coast of Australia. This fifth OD preceded the International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA) held at Curtin Uni­ versity of Technology. Many participants attended both events. There were 28 participants in this year''s mini-conference and 22 presentations in the mini­ conference. The presentations in this volume are refereed contributions based on papers presented at the fifth Optimization Days mini-conference. The volume is di­ vided into the following parts: Global Optimization, Nonsmooth Optimization, Optimization Methods and Applications.