The sixth Annual Irish SIAM Student Chapter Conference was held at NUI Galway on 6 December 2019. Clement Calvino, Daniel Giles and Tatjana Kokina, PhD students and members of the Wave Group of School of Mathematics and Statistics, UCD, attended the conference.
It was a full day, with plenary lectures and presentations from PhD students from all over Ireland. The range of topics was very broad and everyone got to see all possible applications of mathematics from social networks and the dark web, to oceans and protein adsorption.
The first lecture was by Andrea Aleni, Google. He spoke about challenges in Machine Learning, in particular - introducing bias, ideally without introducing systematic prejudices. This was followed by a presentation by Joseph O'Brien, University of Limerick - "How many likes do you think this will get?": Predicting Self-Exciting Processes and a presentation by Enda Carroll, University College Dublin - The dynamics of Fourier phases, synchronization and intermittency in Burgers equations. After a short break, Hassan Alkhayuon, University College Cork, spoke about the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and the heat transport to the North Atlantic sector. This was followed by Bram Siebert, University of Limerick, presenting his work on the role of modularity in the formation of patterns on biological networks. Bram won the talk of the day prize.
The last speaker of the first part of the day was Clement Calvino, University College Dublin, who presented his work on a coupled ocean-wave model for Galway Bay. The presentation was well received and sparked a range of questions from the audience.
The second round of presentations started with a plenary talk by Doireann O'Kiely, University of Oxford, (and UCD Theoretical Physics graduate). She spoke about dynamic wrinkling of elactic sheets. This was followed by Kleber Oliveira, University of Limerick, and his work on topological features of a thread-viewing network in the dark web. This was probably one of the most unexpected talks of the day - trying to understand the interactions of criminals using the dark web. Next, Daniel Giles, University College Dublin, presented his work on rapid tsunami forecasts utilizing the extended Green's Law. The interest of the audience manifested itself through a number of questions that led to a short discussion on what is a fortunate and unfortunate event for someone who studies tsunamies. The day concluded by the talk of Edward Donlon, TU Dublin, on clustering behaviour in random sequential protein adsorption.
It was a great day to see what applied mathematics PhD students around the country are working on; and once again to reconfirm that it does not matter where in the world one looks - one can always use mathematics to model, try to solve, or predict any problem presented.
We would like to thank SIAM NUI Galway Chapter and everyone else involved in organising such a great conference and creating a friendly atmosphere on the day.