ECMI annual report 2021

The ECMI annual report 2021 is out! Showcasing the wide variety of activities in industrial and applied mathematics of the ECMI scientific community, the new issue reports events and results of the year 2021 including the first quarter of 2022.

All the contributions aim to describe the details of the events or programs organised in the last months, as well as novel mathematical problems and solutions involved in them. 

We provide below an extended list of contents of the report, with a brief description for each of them. 

An account of the ECMI 2021 Conference, held as an online event hosted by the Bergische Universität Wuppertal from April 13th to April 15th 2021, opens the section Activities and initiatives. Then we find a presentation of the book “Success Formulas” (in german “Erfolgsformeln”) about the awareness of mathematics, with examples of mathematics in everyday life and its contribution to innovation in all cutting-edge sectors. The following two articles are centred around mathematics in Africa. One describes the role of long-term development and capacity building efforts in mathematics in Africa by the International Science Program (ISP) based at Uppsala University, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). The other shows how the South African Mathematics in Industry Study Group (MISG) addresses both usual topics like optimisation and scheduling, and problems with a distinct African flavour. Finally, a report on the first edition of the conference “Kaiserslautern Applied and Industrial Mathematics Days” (KLAIM) and one on the “Mathematics Meets Industry 2022” (MMI)event conclude the section. KLAIM was focused on the role of applied mathematics in the development of digital twins and took place at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM. MMI was organised on June 2-3, 2022 in Trondheim, Norway, with the purpose of bringing together mathematicians, primarily PhD students, with industrial representatives to facilitate networking activities.

This year’s Featured people section includes an interview with Elisabeth Köbis, associate professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She talks about her research on set optimization, robust approaches to uncertain multi-objective optimization problems, and vector variational inequalities.

Three interesting projects and case studies are featured in the homonymous section. First, motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a new modeling framework for the airborne transmission of viruses is presented, with useful applications for determining how the infection risk changes with space and time, in indoor spaces. Then we find an update on the THREAD project on highly flexible structures for industrial applications. This contains a summary of the activities on the three research work packages: Advanced constitutive laws for slender structures; Interactions of 1D structures in a 3D world; Geometric numerical methods for rod system dynamics. The section ends with a discussion about large scale network adjustment problems, a research project of the European Industrial Doctorate “BIGMATH”, motivated by the problem of digitalization of the cadaster maps in the Netherlands

This is followed by a section with news from the educational committee and a report of the 35th ECMI Modelling Week, held in Verona, Italy, from July 3 to 9, 2022 with around 70 participants from all over Europe.

The final section is about Special Interest Groups (SIGs), that exist to promote collaborative research on specific topics in Mathematics for Industry within Europe. The list includes “Implantable devices and drug delivery systems”, “Liquid Crystals, Elastomers and Biological Applications”, “Math for the Digital Factory”, “Mathematics for Big Data”, “Modelling, Simulation and Optimization in Electrical Engineering (MSOEE)”, “Net Campus for Modelling Education and Industrial Mathematics”, “Sustainable Energies”. Two SIGs are in focus. The first one, “Shape and Size in Medicine, Biotechnology and Materials Science”, emphasises topics relevant in medicine, biotechnology and materials science using techniques from differential geometry, PDEs, geometric measure theory, stochastic geometry, topological data analysis, numerical simulations, reduced order models, among others. The other one, “Computational Finance and Energy Markets”, reports on the minisymposium on financial mathematics that was organised at the MMEI 2021 Conference in Smolenice, Slovakia.