We provide an economic interpretation of the practice consisting in incorporating risk measures as constraints in portfolio optimization problem. For what we call the infimum of expectations class of risk measures, we show that if the decision maker maximizes the expectation of a random return under constraint that the risk measure is bounded above, he then behaves as a "generalized expected utility maximizer". As an application, we make the link between a portfolio maximization problem, subject to Conditional Value-at-Risk being less than a threshold value, and a non-expected utility formulation involving "loss aversion"-type utility functions.

The 2012 event will be a two-day workshop that will cover a range of different areas of discrete mathematics and related areas. The confirmed invited speakers for the workshop are:

 * Gary MacGillivray - University of Victoria

 * Karen Meagher - University of Regina

 * Ortrud Oellermann - University of Winnipeg

 * Paul Ottaway - Thompson Rivers University

 * Lorna Stewart - University of Alberta

 * Csaba Tóth - University of Calgary

Some time slots are available for 25 minute contributed talks (note that higher priority may be given to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and/or junior faculty members should we have more submissions than available time slots). There is also plenty of room for posters and we invite anyone interested in contributing a poster to do so.

Funding from The Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences, as well as the Faculty of Science and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Calgary allows us to offset workshop costs for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows by providing accommodation. Further information is available on the website. There are a limited number of rooms available, so if you are interested, please let the organizers know by March 15, 2012.

Please feel welcome to forward this message to other researchers who may be interested in the workshop, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Karen Seyffarth & Mike Cavers     www.math.ucalgary.ca/pdmw

MMIW 2012 will provide participants with first hand applied training in problem solving that is directly relevant to industrial research. MMIW also provides training in a strong research context that is otherwise difficult to achieve in an academic setting.

MMIW 2012 is centered around the study of seven open problems that are presented by industrial mentors on the first day of the workshop. The participants then divide into groups of roughly six students per team to tackle the problems during the remainder of the 10-day program. Each team will give a progress report to the workshop participants, mentors, and observers at the midpoint of the workshop, and again at the end. Final written reports will be prepared by each team.