2nd ANNOUNCEMENT OF SUMIRFAS 2008 The Informal Regional Functional Analysis Seminar August 8 - 10 Texas A&M University, College Station Confirmed speakers and titles are given below. The schedule for SUMIRFAS will be posted on the Workshop in Analysis and Probability page, URL http://www.math.tamu.edu/research/workshops/linanalysis/ The first talk will be in the early afternoon on Friday and the Seminar concludes by lunch time on Sunday. All talks will be in Blocker 165. The Blocker Building is on Ireland St. just south of University Dr. on the Texas A&M campus: http://www.tamu.edu/map/building/overview/BLOC.html. Coffee and refreshments will be available in Blocker 155. Julien Giol <giol@math.tamu.edu>, David Kerr (chair) <kerr@math.tamu.edu>, and Andrew Toms <atoms@mathstat.yorku.ca> are organizing a Concentration Week on "Operator Algebras, Dynamics, and Classification" which will take place August 4-8. For more information, go to http://www.math.tamu.edu/~kerr/concweek08.html. Ron Douglas <rdouglas@math.tamu.edu> and Jaydeb Sarkar <jsarkar@math.tamu.edu> are organizing a Concentration Week on "Multivariate Operator Theory" that will take place July 28 - August 1. For more information, please visit URL http://www.math.tamu.edu/~jsarkar/cowmot.html. On Saturday evening there will be a BBQ at the home of Jan and Bill Johnson. We expect to be able to cover housing for most participants from support the National Science Foundation has provided for the Workshop. Preference will be given to participants who do not have other sources of support, such as sponsored research grants. When you ask Cara to book your room, please tell them if you are requesting support. Minorities, women, graduate students, and young researchers are especially encouraged to apply. For logistical support, please contact Cara Barton, cara@math.tamu.edu. For more information on the Workshop itself, please contact William Johnson, johnson@math.tamu.edu, David Larson, larson@math.tamu.edu, Gilles Pisier, pisier@math.tamu.edu, or Joel Zinn, jzinn@math.tamu.edu. Speakers include: Bill Arveson, Maximal vectors in Hilbert space and quantum entanglement Nate Brown, Hilbert modules and the Cuntz semigroup Marius Dadarlat, Finite dimensional approximations of amenable groups Ron DeVore, A Taste of Compressed Sensing Detelin Dosev, Commutators on certain Banach spaces Constanze Liaw, Singular integrals and rank one perturbations Timur Oikhberg, The complexity of the complete isomorphism relation between subspaces of an operator space (joint work with C. Rosendal) Grigoris Paouris, Small ball probability estimates for log-concave measures Chris Phillips, Freeness of actions of finite groups on C*-algebras Bunyamin Sari, On uniform classification of the direct sums of $\ell_p$-spaces Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann, Random embeddings and other high-dimensional geometric phenomena Elisabeth Werner, Orlicz functions and minima and maxima of random variables