The Mathematics Departments at both The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH) and the University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY) have a critical mass of faculty, postdocs and graduate students in Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry. Faculty at both institutions often have research collaborations and meet each other at conferences. Younger members of both groups do not have as many opportunities to interact.
KOALA workshops (regular 2-day meetings held once a year, and alternating between both institutions) provide a venue to further expand collaborations between these two groups. Their main goals are:
to establish a community of mathematicians in Kentucky and Ohio working in Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry;
to expose graduate students and junior researchers in both institutions to the many outstanding problems in Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry, and to the tools currently being used to attack them; and
to survey recent developments in Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry (including moduli of curves, toric and tropical geometry, and the related geometry and combinatorics of homogeneous spaces)