SCEE – 2020 – Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Scientific Computing in Electrical Engineering

Between Feb 16-20, 2020, the Conference on Scientific Computing in Electrical Engineering (SCEE-2020) took place in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. It appeared to be one of the last face-to-face conferences before the Corona pandemic really became active. Let me first address the conference series and this event itself.

The SCEE conference series did start in 1997 in Germany at TU Darmstadt moderatly as Workshop by efforts of Michael Günther (now at Bergische Universität Wuppertal) and Ulla van Rienen (yet Universität Rostock). It was followed by a Workshop in Berlin. After that real conferences were held every two years: Rostock/Warnemünde (Germany, 2000), Eindhoven (The Netherlands, 2002), Capo d’Orlando (Sicily, 2004), Sinaia (Romania, 2006), Espoo (Finland, 2008), Toulouse (France, 2010), Zürich (Switzerland, 2012), Wuppertal (Germany, 2014), Sankt Wolfgang (Austria, 2016), Taormina (Sicily, 2018).

These conferences always attract many young researchers who present results from several national and international projects involving mathematicians and electronic engineers, all interested in modeling, scientific computing, testing and verification. In several cases this work is done in cooperation between academia and industry. Proceedings are published in the book series “Mathematics in Industry”, jointly set up by Springer and ECMI.

This year the conference did focus on Computational Electromagnetics, Circuit Simulation and Design, Coupled Problems, and Mathematical and Computational Methods, see the SCEE2020 web page for further details.

Invited Speakers were:

• Albert Ruehli (IEEE life fellow, 50 years IBM, currently at Missouri University of Science and Technology – USA)
• Jasmin Smajic (ETH Zürich – Switzerland)
• Romanus Dyczij-Edlinger (Universty of Saarland – Germany)
• Liliana Borcea (University of Michigan – USA)
• Slawomir Koziel (Reykjavik University – Iceland).

On Wednesday there was an Industrial Morning with Rick Janssen of NXP Semiconductors (Eindhoven, NL), Frank Buijnsters and Remco Dirks of ASML (Veldhoven, NL), and Stefan Kurz of Robert Bosch GmbH (Renningen, Germany)

Of Wuppertal, Marcus Bannenberg (Coupling of Model Order Reduction and Multirate Techniques for coupled time-dependent systems) and Jan Kühn (A hysteresis loss model for Tellinen’s scalar hysteresis model) presented the results on their PhD research. In the course of the conference the SCEE Young Scientists Awards recognizing outstanding achievements and contributions of young scientists were announced.

This conference series is always a place between friends and a place to make friends. Here project proposals are initiated and project meetings are held (like the ROMSOC Project, Reduced Order Modelling, Simulation and Optimization of Coupled Systems). Also ECMI’s Special Interest Group MSOEE had its gathering, led by Sebastian Schöps.

I thank Wil Schilders, Martijn van Beurden, Enna van Dijk (all TU Eindhoven), Neil Budko (TU Delft) and Gabriela Ciuprina (Politehnica University of Bucharest) for their great work in organizing this conference. The next event, planned for March 8-11, 2022, will celebrate the 25-th anniversary in the place where SCEE started: TU Darmstadt.

SCEE-2020 appeared to be one of the last face-to-face events. After the social tour to the Philips, the DAF museum and the Van Abbemuseum (modern art), Albert Ruehli, Hans-Georg Brachtendorf and I were taking a coffee in Queens, wondering about Corona spread. It just had reached northern Italy in a very small town (why there?). The next week rumours came also from affected ski-resorts in Tirol. Within a month, next conferences (like SIAM UQ to be held in Munich) were cancelled. The ECMI-Conference and the ECMI Modeling Week were announced to be shifted for a year. The universities of Eindhoven and of Wuppertal closed attendance teaching and started for e-learning.

Data scientists from TU Eindhoven show  modeling on the prediction of new infections for several countries and for the most affected Dutch provinces , with daily estimates for the next three days. In some cases a horizon is predicted. Also for Italy and for my province, Northern-Brabant, which contains one of the most affected areas in The Netherlands (and as in Italy, it concentrates in places of moderate size).
It is a first sign of hope, but we also have to count for a considerable amount of next victims still to come.

Jan ter Maten

 

PS: The high-resolution pictures of the participants can be found here .