Daejeon, Korea, Hosts Fourth Annual EASIAM Conference
January 10, 2009
Tao Tang (front row, sixth from right), president of the East Asia Section of SIAM, and, on his right, EASIAM vice president Dongwoo Sheen, in Daejeon, Korea, at the fourth conference of EASIAM. On Tang�s left are the two keynote speakers from SIAM, Doug Arnold and Olof Widlund. Arnold, his year as SIAM president-elect drawing to a close, was getting an early start on his intention of working �to increase SIAM�s international stature.�
Dongwoo Sheen
The East Asia Section of SIAM held its fourth annual conference at the Hotel Riviera in Daejeon, Korea, October 10�12, 2008. The conference was held jointly with the NIMS (National Institute for Mathematical Sciences of Korea) conference.
All SIAM members who reside in East Asia are members of EASIAM (http://www.math.hkbu.edu.hk/easiam); the section was founded to promote the spirit and aims of SIAM throughout the region. The three previous EASIAM conferences were held at Hong Kong Baptist University (December 2005), Hokkaido University (August 2006), and Xiamen University (November 2007).
About 70 participants came from nine countries to attend the 2008 conference, which had a program of invited presentations, contributed talks, and six presentations given as part of the student paper competition. The invited speakers---Sangdong Kim (Kyungpook National University), Chang-Ock Lee (KAIST), Seng Luan Lee (National University of Singapore), Ruo Li (Peking University), Ya Yan Lu (City University of Hong Kong), Mitsuhiro T. Nakao (Kyushu University), Xue-Cheng Tai (University of Bergen and Nanyang Technological University), and Shao-Liang Zhang (Nagoya University)---discussed a range of topics: preconditioning techniques, magnetic resonance and electrical impedance tomography, computational graphics and geometry, moving mesh methods, simulation of photonic crystal systems, numerical linear algebra, and numerical verification techniques. Also on the program were two SIAM keynote speakers, Doug Arnold (University of Minnesota) and Olof Widlund (Courant Institute, New York University). Arnold, then SIAM president-elect, introduced SIAM and some of its activities before proceeding to discuss his recent work on the finite element exterior calculus. Olof Widlund, a pioneer of the domain decomposition community, discussed the theory of domain decomposition for less regular subdomains.
The afternoon of the second day, almost everyone at the conference took part in a group tour to Gongju (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gongju), which from 475 to 538 AD was the capital of the Baekje Kingdom (18 BC�660 AD).
EASIAM president Tao Tang, of Hong Kong Baptist University, announced the results of the 2008 student paper competition at the conference banquet. The entries had been evaluated by a committee whose members, in addition to Tang, who chaired the group, were Raymond Chan (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Hisashi Okamoto (Kyoto University), Dongwoo Sheen (Seoul National University), and Zuowei Shen (National University of Singapore). The committee considered the originality and quality of each paper, as well as the suitability of the material for a 20-minute talk to the general audience attending the conference. The grand prix was awarded to Takehiko Kinoshita (Kyushu University) and the first prize to Takafumi Miyata (Nagoya University); Ho-Seok Lee and Byung Hwa Lim (KAIST) and Naoya Yamanaka (Waseda University) shared the second prize, and the third prize was awarded to Ying Ying Zhang (University of Macau). A cash prize of U.S.$1000 was distributed among the prize winners.
In last year's EASIAM student paper competition, Shiping Mao (Institute of Computational Mathematics, Beijing) received the first prize and Yumei Huang (Hong Kong Baptist University) the second prize; Chien-Hong Cho (Kyoto University) and Alexander Shapeev (National University of Singapore) shared the third prize.
Recipients of EASIAM student paper prizes gathered with section officers and visitors.
EASIAM acknowledges generous support from SIAM for the keynote speakers and the student paper prizes. The next EASIAM conference will be held at the University of Brunei Darussalam, June 8�11, 2009.
Dongwoo Sheen, vice president of EASIAM, is a professor at Seoul National University.
