Between 26 and 30 June the 22nd ECMI Conference on Industrial and Applied Mathematics took place at Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Lower Silesia, Poland. European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) is a pan-European organisation which promotes the development of applied and industrial mathematics and facilitates cooperation between the academia and the industry. ECMI Conferences are biannual events which started in 1983 and are one of the main European forums where industry and science can interact and exchange ideas.
Photo: a group picture of the participants in the lecture hall.
This time the ECMI Conference was organised by the Faculty of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Wrocław where applied mathematical studies are conducted at the Department of Applied Mathematics and the Hugo Steinhaus Center which specialises in stochastic and numerical techniques. The Department also organises ECMI-accredited Applied Mathematics curriculum.
The Conference had 300 participants: 89 from Poland, 70 from Germany, 117 from the rest of Europe and 24 from the rest of the world. More than 200 talks were given, which covered almost all subfields of applied mathematics: statistics and data analysis, machine learning, numerical approximation, signal processing, financial engineering and risk management, differential equations, optimization, climate studies, damage diagnostics, and many more. Discussed application areas included energy industry, biology and medicine, ecology, physics, economy, production systems, mechanical industry, and transport.
9 plenary lectures were given by:
- Ruth Baker (University of Oxford, United Kingdom) who gave a lecture Quantitative comparisons between models and data to provide new insights in cell and developmental biology
- Dirk Hartmann (Siemens, Germany) who gave a lecture Executable Digital Twins - Integrating the digital and real world
- Uwe Iben (Bosch, Germany) who gave a lecture Taylor Mapping and Polynomial Neural Networks for solving forward and inverse Ordinary Differential Equations
- Ron S. Kenett (Samuel Neaman Institute, Technion) who gave a lecture Engineering, big data, and the future
- Irena Lasiecka (University of Memphis, US) who gave a lecture Can we control a flutter in flow-structure interactions?
- Henrik Madsen Technical University of Denmark, Denmark) who gave a lecture Forecasting for the Weather-Driven Energy System
- Mathilde Mougeot (École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, France) who gave a lecture Machine Learning Design for Industrial Small Data regimes
- Claudia Schillings (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) who gave a lecture PDE-constrained Optimization under Uncertainty
- Rafał Weron (Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland) who gave a lecture Recent Advances in Electricity Price Forecasting: A 2023 Perspective
Aside from scientific aspect, an important part of the Conference was the Industry Day, during which representatives of the industry were discussing mathematical tools used at their companies and prospects of further cooperation. The companies involved were:
- KGHM – Polish company, a major copper and silver producer in the world and also the main sponsor of the conference,
- BNY Mellon – American investment banking company, one of the oldest banks in the world,
- Santander Consumer Bank – part of Spanish multinational financial services company,
- Nokia – Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation,
- Sun Cable – Australian company that develops renewable energy networks in Oceania and Southeast Asia,
- Saule Technologies – Polish company that develops next generation solar panels based on perovskite technology,
- SatRev – Polish high-tech company that specialises in building lightweight nanosatellites.
In the photo: After the talks Uwe Iben (Bosch), Anna Futoma-Szymańska (Santander Bank Polska), Dietmar Hömberg (WIAS Berlin), Peregrina Quintela (U Santiago de Comp.) and Jakub Tomczyk (Sun Cable) participated in the panel discussion The Future of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
During the Conference Anile-ECMI Prize for Mathematics in Industry was awarded to Marco Tezzele (U Texas, Austin) for his PhD thesis Data-driven parameter and model order reduction for industrial optimisation problems with applications in naval engineering. Hansjörg Wacker Memorial Prize was awarded to Michael Wiesheu (Technische U Darmstadt) for his Master’s thesis Shape optimization of a magnetocaloric cooling system with isogeometric finite elements. Moreover, prof. Aleksander Weron from Wrocław University of Science and Technology received honorary ECMI membership. Congratulations!
