abstract: In many contexts it is of interest to sample paths of diffusion processes, conditional on observations of various kinds. We introduce an SPDE based approach to this problem, generalizing the Langevin equation to this path space setting. The Langevin equation is used to construct a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which is shown to have desirable sampling properties. Various applications are described, including signal processing, data assimilation and rare event sampling in molecular dynamics. Joint work with Martin Hairer and Jochen Voss.