22nd ECMI Conference begins

22nd ECMI Conference on Industrial and Applied Mathematics starts Monday 26 June 2023. Close to 300 participants from academia and industry during 5 days of the conference will meet, discuss and cooperate in the joint effort to develop new mathematical methods and use them to solve problems which arise in business, technology and applied sciences. As always, huge attention will be given to interdisciplinary approach to research and innovation.

At the opening of the conference there will be award ceremony for The Anile-ECMI Prize for Mathematics in Industry and Hansjörg Wacker Memorial Prize. Also during the first day, two distinguished speakers will give plenary lectures.

Dirk Hartmann

Industrial mathematician, Siemens Technical Fellow, intrapreneur, and thought leader in the field of Simulation and Digital Twin will give a lecture Executable Digital Twins – Integrating the digital and real world. A digital twin is a digital representation of an intended or actual real-world physical product, system, or process. They are often made before there is a real-life product and are used to simulate and model the entire lifecycle of the entity they represent.

The lecture will discuss a recently developed executable digital twin (xDT) concept, that is stand-alone and self-contained executable model for a specific set of behaviours. The xDT uses data from a small number of sensors embedded in the physical product to perform real-time simulations using reduced-order models. From those small numbers of sensors, it can predict the physical state at any point on the object. To achieve this, a broad toolset of mathematical technologies is required – ranging from model order reduction, calibration to hybrid physics- and data-based models. Dirk Hartmann will review the concept of executable digital twins, address mathematical key building blocks such as model order reduction, real-time models, state estimation, and co-simulation and detail its power along a few selected use cases.

Ron S. Kenett

He is an applied statistician from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology who combines expertise in academic, consulting and business domains. He authored and co-authored over 250 papers and 18 books on data science, industrial statistics, biostatistics, healthcare, customer surveys, multivariate quality control, risk management, system and software testing, and information quality. He will give Alan Tayler Memorial Lecture with the title Engineering, big data, and the future.

The subject will be the use of mathematical modelling and data analysis related to Industry 4.0 concept which is used to analyse changes in contemporary technology, industries, societal patterns and processes due to increasing interconnectivity and smart automation. It is characterised by large shifts in how the global production and supply network operate and joining of technologies like artificial intelligence, gene editing, to advanced robotics. This results in blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds.

Topics of current scientific interest include hybrid models, soft sensors, digital twins and model order reduction methods. Differential and partial differential equations can be combined with empirical models to provide enhanced precision and generalizability. The talk will review this background and sketch future pathways emphasizing engineering of performance, in contrast to engineering of design.

About the organisers

This year the conference is organised by Faculty of Pure and Applied Mathematics at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Here, the researchers interested in applied and industrial mathematics gather in Hugo Steinhaus Center. It is named after Hugo Steinhaus, a prominent Polish-Jewish mathematician with great accomplishments in both pure and applied mathematics, one of the most important contributors to the famous Lwów School of Mathematics. He was one of the founders of the probability theory but also worked successfully in geometry, functional analysis, theory of trigonometric and Fourier series and even mathematical logic. He is perhaps best known for his and his student Stefan Banach’s proof of uniform boundedness principle (also called Steinhaus-Banach theorem). He was also a great proponent of applied mathematics and enthusiastically collaborated with engineers, geologists, economists, physicians, biologists and lawyers.

Contemporarily, Hugo Steinhaus Center organizes, encourages and supports research on and education in stochastic techniques as applied in science and technology. A study of related theoretical mathematical issues is an integral part of the Center’s research. Random and chaotic phenomena provide the unifying intellectual theme of the Center, and represent an area where certain frontiers of mathematics, economics, natural sciences, and engineering can fully overlap on problems that are fundamental and yet have practical implications in finance and technology. A feature of the Center is a synthesis of viewpoints of mathematicians, economists, computer scientists, physicists, chemists and engineers, working in the Center on equal footing.