Toulouse is a city of roughly 700 000 people, located in the south-west part of France, half way between the Mediteranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, at the bottom of the Pyrenean Mountains. The main industries are Aeronautics and Space (The French Part of the Airbus Industry is located there).

There are more than 100 000 students in town, with 3 universities and many engeneering schools. This provides a good scientific environment, especially for students interested in Mathematics and their Applications.

University Paul Sabatier is the main scientific university, and its mathematics department shelters more than 100 full time people, most of them in one of the 3 main laboratories : "Laboratoire Emile Picard", the pure maths laboratory, Mathématiques pour l'Industrie et la Physique, the mathematical modelling and numerical analysis laboratory, and the "Laboratoire de Statistique et Probabiltées" (LSP), where is the Stochastic Analysis Group. This laboratory has 40 full time teachers and researchers, 5 of them working for the CNRS.

The Stochastic Analysis Group is for the moment composed of 3 full Professors (D. Bakry, M. Ledoux, D.Michel), 1 Research Director in CNRS (L. Saloff-Coste), 2 "Charg\'es de Recherche" (P. Del Moral, L.Miclo), 3 "Maitres de Conferences" (M. Benaim, P. Carmona, L. Coutin), 1 post-doc (Z. Qian). There is an average of 3 PhD Dissertations defended each year by students of this group.

The main topics of interest are : Control and Filtering, Markov Chains, especially study of convergence to equilibrium, Gaussian and Infinite Dimensional Analysis, Markov Semigroup Analysis, Random Algorithms, Stochastic Calculus, with side interests in various topics such as Path and Loop Spaces, Infinite Particle Systems, Statistical Mechanics, Riemannian Geometry, Statistics,....http://www-sv.cict.fr/lsp/proba.htm

Dominique Bakry
Laboratoire de Statistique et Probabilites,
Departement de Mathematiques,
Universite P. Sabatier,
118, route de Narbonne,
31062 Toulouse Cedex France
Tl (33) 61 55 82 12
sec (33) 61 55 67 72
fax (33) 61 55 60 89