The interdisciplinary workshop "Finite Element Methods in Science and Engineering" will take place at the University of Texas at El Paso on December 11 - 14, 2006. The goal of the meeting is to facilitate the communication among mathematicians, engineers, and software developers working in various areas related to the Finite Element Method (FEM). The rapid development of the FEM is tightly connected with the development of the scientific computing hardware. In the last 15--20 years we have witnessed a substantial development of computers. Nowadays a desktop PC for about $1,000 has more computing power than the best computer that was available 15--20 years ago. According to realistic estimates, this rapid development will continue at least for the next 10--15 years. Thus it will be possible to perform extremely large computations compared to what is possible today. The input data for scientific computations always contain smaller or larger uncertainties that lead to uncertainties in the predictions based upon the computed results. Therefore, one of the important open questions is how to formulate this uncertainty and how to control it. A large potential to be exploited lies in interval computation: A significant part of the audience will consist of interval computation experts. It is another goal of the meeting to disseminate the highly-accurate and efficient modern methods, such as the spectral and hp-FEM, into the engineering community. Vice versa, the mathematicians will benefit from getting a realistic idea about the interests and needs of the engineering audience.
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is the most frequently used numerical method for the computer simulation of a large variety of processes in science and engineering, such as the weather, heat transfer, elasticity/plasticity, the motion of fluids, chemical reactions, electromagnetics, and others. The efficient and accurate simulation of these processes finds direct applications in areas of national interest, such as
(a) reducing the energy consumption of major industrial technologies, (b) weather, hurricane, and flood prediction, (c) prediction of the ozone layer development and global warming effects, (d) improving the security of spacecrafts located on the orbit of the Earth and their crews, (e) improvement of defense systems such as remote location of airplanes and missiles, and many others.
The FEM also is used to improve the understanding of natural phenomena that cannot be measured (such as, for example, the dynamics of ocean streams, fluid-electromagnetic processes on the surface of the Sun, interaction of the Solar Wind with the geomagnetic field of the Earth, etc. The audience will comprise 8 invited keynote speakers who are renowned authorities in the field, approximately 30 contributing speakers and 10 students. The proceedings of the workshop will be published in a quality scientific journal (Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics). The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), with approximately 19,000 students of whom 80--85 % are of Hispanic origin, is one of the largest Hispanic-serving institutions in the nation. In addition to its scientific goals, the proposed workshop is expected to attract the attention of the scienrific community to UTEP and its effort to develop a new Ph.D. program in Computational Science.
