Hello everybody,

Welcome to the Fall 2020's version of STA348 - Introduction to Stochastic Processes! Please take your time to go through the syllabus and published modules to familiarize yourself with the course. We are here to help you succeed in this course. Please attend online lectures and tutorials regularly, and actively participate in the course by asking and answering questions during lectures, tutorials and office hours. Note that lectures start on September 9th and tutorials on 10th.

As the title suggests, the main goal of the course is to introduce Stochastic processes. We plan to discuss discrete and continuous-time Markov chains, random walks, single-server queues, M/M/n queues, Poisson processes, branching processes, birth and death process, and Brownian motion including some interesting real world applications of them. In fact, such processes have been used extensively to model seemingly random phenomena in many fields including biology, ecology, chemistry, physics, medicine, computer science, telecommunication and finance.

I hope that by the end of the course, you will understand more about probability theory and stochastic processes and will appreciate their real world applications.

Good Luck!

Figure - The physical phenomena of the diffusion of particles from high to low concentration. This can be modeled using diffusion processes. (source: youtube link)

"The theory of probability as a mathematical discipline can and should be developed from axioms in exactly the same way as geometry and algebra." - Andrey Kolmogorov, the father of modern theory of probability and one of the most prominent mathematicians of the 20th century.