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7th SIAM UKIE National Student Chapter Conference

By Francisco de Melo Viríssimo, Dan Green, Amy Middleton, Owen Pembery, Benjamin Robinson, and Malena Sabate Landman

On the 18th and 19th of June, the University of Bath Student Chapter of SIAM and IMA hosted the 7th SIAM UKIE National Student Chapter Conference. The conference brought together students working in many areas of applied and industrial mathematics, and related fields, from across the UK and the Republic of Ireland. There were opportunities for students to showcase their research through talks and posters. The conference included 4 plenary talks, 29 contributed talks and 23 contributed posters, and was attended by over 110 participants from 25 different institutions from the UK and Europe. A number of attendees were not mathematicians, but rather came from departments of architecture; physics; psychology; economics; and biomedical, mechanical, and civil engineering.

The conference featured four plenary talks from world leading researchers. Nicole Spillane (École Polytechnique) described her work on Domain Decomposition Methods with Adaptive Multipreconditioning, beginning with an introduction to domain decomposition methods before moving on to describe adaptive multipreconditioning, a preconditioning method that combines the best parts of iterative and direct solvers. The second plenary session was given by Marta Blangiardo (Imperial College London), who gave an overview of the methods, examples, and challenges in spatio-temporal statistics.

The first evening of the conference featured a poster session and wine reception with 23 posters, which included a wide variety of research, ranging from using topology to design frame structures for buildings to dynamically optimising clinical trials, via methods for high-order nonlinear PDEs, boundary layers on rotating discs, techniques for analysing RNA data in cancer, and modelling indoor wifi signals.

The second day of the conference featured talks from Ian Griffiths (University of Oxford & Princeton University) and Simon Chandler-Wilde (University of Reading). Ian spoke about his work applying fluid dynamics to industrial problems, such as the removal of arsenic from water supplies in Bangladesh and the manufacture of glass screens for smartphones. The conference was concluded with Simon Chandler-Wilde (presenting his recent work, answering a long-standing open question). He gave a clear introduction to the analytic concepts involved in showing that the convergence of Galerkin methods for Laplace’s equation is not guaranteed on arbitrary Lipschitz domains.

In addition to the plenary lectures, students from 15 universities presented their work through contributed talks. These presentations covered topics such as strategies for the Prisoner’s dilemma, the predictability of the climate, the spreading of droplets, models for image registration, modelling biodegradable polymers, adaptive numerical methods for singular reaction-diffusion equations, models for simulating fingerprints, numerical simulation of scattering by ice crystals, and the simulation of individuals moving across a network, amongst many others.

Abstracts, slides, and photos from the event can be found at the conference official website.

The conference was very generously supported by grants from SIAM and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. The organisers also secured grants from the University of Bath’s Doctoral College, Institute for Mathematical Innovation (IMI), and Department of Mathematical Sciences, as well as industrial sponsorship from CFM, MyLife Digital, and Overleaf.

Francisco de Melo Viríssimo graduated from the University of São Paulo with a BSc in mathematics and a MSc in applied mathematics. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Bath, working with Paul Milewski in the mathematics and numerics of waves in fluids. Francisco has been the president of the University of Bath Chapter of SIAM and IMA since 2016. Dan Green is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Bath, working in the area of model reduction for data assimilation problems. He is the secretary of the University of Bath Chapter of SIAM and IMA. Amy Middleton if the vice president of the University of Bath Chapter of SIAM and IMA. Owen Pembery is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath. He works on uncertainty quantification for acoustic waves in random media with Ivan Graham and Euan Spence. Owen is a committee member for the University of Bath Chapter of SIAM and IMA. Benjamin Robinson is a Ph.D. student in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Maths at the University of Bath. He is the treasurer of the University of Bath Chapter of SIAM and IMA. Malena Sabate Landman is a committee member for the University of Bath Chapter of SIAM and IMA.

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