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ECMI 2008 CONFERENCE

The 15th European Conference on Mathematics in Industry was held in London 30 June - 4 July 2008 partly hosted and sponsored by the LIMS programme. The conference was organised by an international committee with UCL and LIMS representatives joining in. A team of undergraduate students, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers marshalled by Arren Ariel helped in the running of the conference itself. Details are on the ECMI website.

These meetings are organised by the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) every two years and the last one to be held in the UK was in 1988. The conference was as usual devoted to mathematical modelling, analysis and simulation of problems arising
in industry and commerce but in 2008 there was a particular emphasis on new and developing areas of application.

ECMI 2008 took place at UCL and emphasised the role of mathematics as a unique overarching industrial resource. The conference began with appreciations of the impact of Mathematics-in-Industry by leading figures from industry, science and government. Thereafter it took the form of a research conference which promoted the application of innovative mathematics to industry, interpreted in its broadest sense. Emphasis was placed on the industrial sectors that offer the most exciting opportunities for mathematicians of all kinds to provide relevant insight and new ideas. Some of the highlighted themes were as follows.

• Socio-economic interactions, including agent-based modelling, game theory, logistics in the retail sector….
• Medicine and the medical industry, including health systems and planning, surgery, modelling of ageing population, medical devices, patterns in bioinformatics….
• Sport and leisure, including equipment design, strategies, gambling and its regulation, biomechanics….
• Uncertainty and risk, including pension plans, hedge funds, energy options…..
• Optimisation and control, including transport systems, sending and communication devices, distributed intelligence….
• Energy, including sustainability, extreme events, interactions on the global scale…
• Traditional industrial sectors such as glass, metals, textiles, food, electronics, automotive and aerospace…
Synergies between these themes were encouraged. The lists of plenary talks and mini-symposia are on the website. Numerous contributions were made by LIMS and related members. The proceedings of the conference are to be published next year by Springer in their Mathematics in Industry series.

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