The principal investigator and her colleagues organize a workshop for industrial math problems. The format follows one introduced by Oxford University applied mathematicians in 1968, which has been replicated frequently in the UK, Canada, Europe, and in various other countries (there are 8-10 such workshops each year). The format consists of an initial presentation of a number of problems by industrial scientists/engineers. The audience is then organized into small groups to work separately on each problem for 3-4 days. An oral reporting session concludes the week, followed by a written report on each problem some weeks later. The participants in the workshop consist of from 30-40 graduate students and about 30 faculty, and with an expectation of at least 6 problems from industry this means that each problem is worked on by 10 applied mathematicians. The workshop is preceded by a student modeling camp which follows a similar format except each problem is presented by a faculty member. Some of these problems may have been partially addressed by the faculty presenter, others not, and the aim of the camp is to bring the student participants into the culture of intensive group work, and to give them confidence in starting the week when ALL the participants start on NEW, practically-important problems knowing that their experience and hard work will prove fruitful.
Apart from a substantial record of success in providing answers to the problems (this is catalogued at a web-site where e-prints for 250 individual reports from recent workshops are available in many, quite diverse, application areas), there are multiple goals for the event: establishment of closer connections between industrial and academic scientists; education of students and faculty about the requirements of industry in the use of mathematics; training of students in group participation projects (the norm in industry), and the experience of working alongside faculty and joining in the ups and downs of intensive work where progress is measured by an industrialist in need of a result. Problems committed to the workshop include one from a semiconductor company for modeling current flow in a new design nanoscale transistor, and two from bio-tech companies, one relating to a medical device that has unwanted internal vibrations and the other needing statistical modeling for micro-array analysis.
