Industrial Problem-Solving Days
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Description:
The Industrial Problem-solving Days will be devoted to organising meetings with industry to discuss industrial problems. The Working Group will organise workshops on this theme throughout Europe. They will be based on the successful ‘Study Groups with Industry’ and the 1999 Newton Institute meeting on ‘Free Boundary Problems in Industry’, but will concentrate on the MACSI-net themes and on encouraging SMEs to take advantage of MACSI-net.  The workshops will be exploratory sessions specially designed to give industry the opportunity to bring problems -both specific and generic - to a forum where they can be looked at in depth by a team of academic mathematicians. 

The workshops may take a variety of forms and ideas proposed so far include 

  • Problems from a specific (but wide) industrial area which has not yet been much investigated by mathematicians (eg food). 
  • Problems (particularly from SMES) based in a specific area.  Here we expect to get help from local organisations to target small companies in a specific locality.
Subjects:
In all cases it is difficult to be precise about the exact industrial problems to be considered ahead of time but experience with the European Study Groups with Industry shows that a meeting of this sort is likely to identify one or two themes suitable for working groups and may also lead to student projects based in industry and recruitment opportunities for students.  They also provide an excellent opportunity for training students by letting them see the difficulties inherent in real problems and to witness experienced researchers attacking brand new problems. 

Proposal for activities:
Each meeting will be based entirely on new problems from industry.  Once problems have been identified, suitable experts will be invited to participate, the problems will be posted on the web and the meeting will be open to all academic mathematicians. 
It is anticipated that each year some three workshops will be organised

Past activities:
Workshop on Problems from the Textile Industry: 4 April 2002, Lancaster (UK)
Study Group with Industry, 17-21 February 2003, Leiden, The Netherlands
Study Group with Industry, 31 March - 4 April 2003, Bristol, UK

Mathematics for Industry, 26 August 2003, Sonderborg, Denmark
Modeling Week, 22-31 August 2003, Bristol, UK

 




 

Participants
  • H Ockendon (Oxford, UK)- moderator: 
  • R Mattheij (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) 
  • S McKee (Strathclyde, UK) 
  • C Please (Southampton, UK) 
  • J Gravesen (Lyngby, Denmark) 
  • P Hjorth (Lyngby, Denmark) 
  • G Hek  (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
  • W. Schilders (Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
  • S. Wilson (Strathclyde, UK)
  • R. Melnik (Sonderborg, Denmark)
  • R. Piché (Tampere, Finland)
  • A. Muntean (Bremen, Germany)
Contact the moderator
  ociam@maths.ox.ac.uk 
Register as a participant 
Register as participant using this form
Eindhoven, July 17, 2003 - macsi.win@tue.nl