SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES

Overview

This conference will be the 17th annual meeting since the first meeting held in the Spring of 1997 in honor of Professor E. E. Granirer. The Symposium has been held in many places such as UBC, Waterloo, Saskatchewan, Windsor, Alberta, Western, Manitoba, Carleton and Thunder Bay. To continue the tradition, we plan to hold the 17th Symposium in Thunder Bay again, the second time since 1997.

This regular conference acts as a focal point for the activities of the Canadian Abstract Harmonic Analysis community. The Symposium began with a core group of about a dozen people from Canadian universities who have attended almost every year. The two days Symposium usually has about 25 participants including graduate students and post-docs. At most Symposia there have been a number of additional individuals who have been invited as guest speakers with the goal of broadening both the level and the scope of interaction that our group has with mathematicians outside of Canada and in other areas relating to Abstract Harmonic Analysis.

This year's main speakers are Professor Zhong-Jin Ruan from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has over a long career made fundamental contributions to a number of areas of operator spaces and abstract harmonic analysis, and Professor Adam Skalski from Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences and University of Warsaw, a noted young mathematician who specializes in the theory of quantum groups.

Speakers:

Zhong-Jin Ruan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Approximation Properties of Groups and Group C*-algebras

In this talk, I will discussed various approximation properties related to discrete groups and group C*-algebras. I am particularly
interested in the weak amenability, Haagerup property, exactness and coarse embeddability.

Adam Skalski, Polish Academy of Sciences and University of Warsaw
Idempotent measures for classical and quantum groups

Idempotent probability measures on locally compact groups arise naturally as limit distributions of random walks. Thus they have been for a long time an object of interest for probabilists and in 1940 Kawada and Ito showed they all arise as Haar measures on compact subgroups. In later years a quest for characterisation of general idempotent measures was taken by harmonic analysts, with the most general result obtained by Cohen for abelian groups. At the same time the Fourier approach suggested looking for idempotent functions in the Fourier-Stieltjes algebra.
It turns out that both of these topics of study can be unified and extended in the investigation of idempotent functionals on the algebras of functions on (locally) compact quantum groups. The arising problems lie at the intersection of abstract harmonic analysis, Hopf algebras, operator algebras and noncommutative probability. In this talk we will describe some of the historical motivations and then introduce the developments in the area within the last 5 years. We will focus on one hand on the similarities/differences between the classical and quantum context, and on the other on connections or applications of the study of idempotent functionals to other quantum group questions.
(Based on joint work with Teodor Banica, Uwe Franz, Matthias Neufang, Pekka Salmi, Nico Spronk and Reiji Tomatsu)

Participants (as of April 18, 2013)

Full Name	University/Affiliation
Brannan, Michael	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Cao, Peng	Beijing Institute of Technology
Choi, Yemon	University of Saskatchewan
Forrest, Brian	University of Waterloo
Govindan Kutty Menon, Sajith	S S College
Ilie, Monica	Lakehead University
Mazowita, Matthew	University of Alberta
Ruan, Zhong-Jin	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sangani Monfared, Mehdi	University of Windsor
Spronk, Nicolaas	University of Waterloo
Tahmasebi, Nazanin	university of alberta
Viselter, Ami	University of Alberta
Wiersma, Matthew	University of Waterloo

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