The international conference entitled "New Trends in Approximation Theory" was held at the Fields Institute, in Toronto, from July 25 until July 29, 2016. The conference was fondly dedicated to the memory of our unique friend and colleague, Andre Boivin, who gave tireless service in Canada until his very last moment of his life in October 2014. The impact of his warm personality and his fine work on Complex Approximation Theory was reflected by the mathematical excellence and the wide research range of the 37 participants. In total there were 27 talks, delivered by well-established mathematicians and young researchers. In particular, 19 invited lectures were delivered by leading experts of the field, from 8 different countries. The wide variety of presentations composed a mosaic of aspects of approximation theory, highlighting interesting connections with important contemporary areas of Analysis. Primary topics discussed include application of approximation theory (isoperimetric inequalities, construction of entire order-isomorphisms, dynamical sampling); approximation by harmonic and holomorphic functions (especially uniform and tangential approximation), polynomial and rational approximation; zeros of approximants and zero-free approximation; tools used in approximation theory; approximation on complex manifolds, in product domains, and in function spaces; and boundary behaviour and universality properties of Taylor and Dirichlet series.

Honoring Andrei Agrachev's 60th birthday, this volume presents recent advances in the interaction between Geometric Control Theory and sub-Riemannian geometry. On the one hand, Geometric Control Theory used the differential geometric and Lie algebraic language for studying controllability, motion planning, stabilizability and optimality for control systems. The geometric approach turned out to be fruitful in applications to robotics, vision modeling, mathematical physics etc. On the other hand, Riemannian geometry and its generalizations, such as sub-Riemannian, Finslerian geometry etc., have been actively adopting methods developed in the scope of geometric control. Application of these methods has led to important results regarding geometry of sub-Riemannian spaces, regularity of sub-Riemannian distances, properties of the group of diffeomorphisms of sub-Riemannian manifolds, local geometry and equivalence of distributions and sub-Riemannian structures, regularity of the Hausdorff volume, etc.

This work presents a general theory as well as constructive methodology in order to solve "observation problems," namely, those problems that pertain to reconstructing the full information about a dynamical process on the basis of partial observed data. A general methodology to control processes on the basis of the observations is also developed. Illustrative but practical applications in the chemical and petroleum industries are shown.

The international conference entitled "New Trends in Approximation Theory" was held at the Fields Institute, in Toronto, from July 25 until July 29, 2016. The conference was fondly dedicated to the memory of our unique friend and colleague, Andre Boivin, who gave tireless service in Canada until his very last moment of his life in October 2014. The impact of his warm personality and his fine work on Complex Approximation Theory was reflected by the mathematical excellence and the wide research range of the 37 participants. In total there were 27 talks, delivered by well-established mathematicians and young researchers. In particular, 19 invited lectures were delivered by leading experts of the field, from 8 different countries. The wide variety of presentations composed a mosaic of aspects of approximation theory, highlighting interesting connections with important contemporary areas of Analysis. Primary topics discussed include application of approximation theory (isoperimetric inequalities, construction of entire order-isomorphisms, dynamical sampling); approximation by harmonic and holomorphic functions (especially uniform and tangential approximation), polynomial and rational approximation; zeros of approximants and zero-free approximation; tools used in approximation theory; approximation on complex manifolds, in product domains, and in function spaces; and boundary behaviour and universality properties of Taylor and Dirichlet series.

This book proposes a semi-discrete version of the theory of Petitot and Citti-Sarti, leading to a left-invariant structure over the group SE(2,N), restricted to a finite number of rotations. This apparently very simple group is in fact quite atypical: it is maximally almost periodic, which leads to much simpler harmonic analysis compared to SE(2). Based upon this semi-discrete model, the authors improve on previous image-reconstruction algorithms and develop a pattern-recognition theory that also leads to very efficient algorithms in practice.

Honoring Andrei Agrachev's 60th birthday, this volume presents recent advances in the interaction between Geometric Control Theory and sub-Riemannian geometry. On the one hand, Geometric Control Theory used the differential geometric and Lie algebraic language for studying controllability, motion planning, stabilizability and optimality for control systems. The geometric approach turned out to be fruitful in applications to robotics, vision modeling, mathematical physics etc. On the other hand, Riemannian geometry and its generalizations, such as sub-Riemannian, Finslerian geometry etc., have been actively adopting methods developed in the scope of geometric control. Application of these methods has led to important results regarding geometry of sub-Riemannian spaces, regularity of sub-Riemannian distances, properties of the group of diffeomorphisms of sub-Riemannian manifolds, local geometry and equivalence of distributions and sub-Riemannian structures, regularity of the Hausdorff volume, etc.

This 2001 book presents a general theory as well as a constructive methodology to solve 'observation problems', that is, reconstructing the full information about a dynamical process on the basis of partial observed data. A general methodology to control processes on the basis of the observations is also developed. Illustrative but also practical applications in the chemical and petroleum industries are shown. This book is intended for use by scientists in the areas of automatic control, mathematics, chemical engineering and physics.