Soon after the spread of the COVID-19 virus began to affect plans for physical meetings in 2020, ECMI turned its activities on-line instead.
The first of these activities was a web conference on various aspects of mathematical modelling for the unfolding epidemics (collectively turning into a pandemic). The health authorities in countries across Europe relied on specialists in mathematical modelling, and many ECMI member universities were (and still are) very active in this area.
See: https://ecmiindmath.org/2020/05/04/mathematics-of-the-covid19-crisis-an-ecmi-webinar
One of the ECMI's longest running and most popular educational activities, the ECMI Modelling Camp for students, was scheduled to take place in Russia, in St. Petersburg. The physical camp event had to be cancelled, but the city where Euler did much of his brilliant work was not late in moving the event on line.
The famous Study Groups with Industry began in the UK, and also here, the event has to be conducted on-line instead of a physical meeting. This year University of Leeds is hosting the Study Group.
See: https://conferences.leeds.ac.uk/lesgi/
An ECMI students competition. Seeking to involve undergraduates in mathematical modelling with an industrial flavor, ECMI has this spring opened a student competition for the best modelling study. The task is to derive a prediction model for pollen concentration using whatever approach is deemed more effective by the participants. This might include analytic, semi-analytic approaches, statistics, modelling and numerics.
See:
Journal of Mathematics in Industry is the ECMI journal dedicated to studies in Industrial Mathematics. In this period of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, scientists, and in particular mathematicians and statisticians, are investing an unprecedented amount of effort in trying to forecast and suggest measures to mitigate the ill-fated effects of the pandemic.
Knowing this pandemic will very likely deeply modify our future life, society, production, health management, and many other aspects of human life there is an urgent need to provide and record scientifically reliable studies of the many aspects of the problem to policy makers.
An upcoming special issue of Journal of Mathematics in Industry is devoted to collecting articles which propose data driven mathematical or statistical models of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and/or of its foreseen consequences on public health, society, industry, economics and technology. See:
https://ecmiindmath.org/2020/04/05/journal-of-mathematics-in-industry-special-issue-on-covid19/ or
https://mathematicsinindustry.springeropen.com/mathcovid19-page
And finally, a new initiative from ECMI. The ECMI Special Interest Group on Virtual Education has been studying the potential of cooperation and exchange of educational resources among ECMI nodes as a means to alleviate the problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
ECMI has collected from partners descriptions of courses, which have some level of on-line availability, asking the technical issues, the used platform, access rights, type of the course (synchronous, asynchronous) etc.
From these courses ECMI has selected various Master level courses given in English to build the basis for the “ECMI Net Campus”
See: https://ecmiindmath.org/2020/05/29/ecmi-net-campus-launched/
