A mathematician, a statistician and a physicist gather in a room…” sounds like the beginning of a joke. It was, however, the main ingredient of a very successful first annual meeting of the Dutch Inverse Problems community.
The meeting on November 25-26 took place in conference centre De Werelt in Lunteren and brought together researchers from various Dutch universities working on Inverse Problems. This community includes mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, earth scientists, and medical imagers, all working on fundamental and applied aspects of Inverse Problems. Such inverse problems occur whenever parameters need to be inferred from measurements, and cover a wide range of applications. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, researchers from these various fields rarely meet. The goal of this meeting was to stimulate exchange of ideas across disciplines.
The talks included one on Optical tomography (Dr. J. Kalkman), MEG Brain imaging (Dr. R. Hindriks) and Seismic source inference (Prof. dr. J. Trampert).
On Thursday, two masterclasses on Data Assimilation and Optimisation Techniques were aimed at PhD students and taught them both in-depth and practical knowledge on these topics. After a delicious buffet-diner, there was some time to relax and watch a movie or play a game. The next day, six invited speakers from various Dutch universities gave an overview of the breadth of research done on Inverse Problems in The Netherlands. To close the meeting, a panel with researchers from both academia and industry discussed how the gap between them can be bridged and what successful modes of collaboration exist.
All in all, it was a very fruitful meeting and everyone was enthusiastic about the prospect of having more events like these. We are looking forward to the second annual meeting already!
