IRES Track 1 Graduate Research In Industrial Projects for Students - Berlin

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will support the "Graduate-level Research in Industrial Projects for Students-Berlin" (GRIPS) led by the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). The program will offer graduate students in mathematics and related disciplines the opportunity to work on industry-sponsored research problems in Berlin through a collaboration with Research Campus MODAL in Berlin, Germany. MODAL has existing industrial partners affiliated with their laboratories that provide their research groups with interesting and challenging research problems. The program will be eight weeks in length; eight US graduate students will participate each summer. Half of the US students each year will be women, and one or more will be a member of an underrepresented ethnic group. MODAL will recruit 8 European students to form 4 research groups of two US and two European students each, and provide academic mentors. The program will not only produce interesting research in applications of mathematics to real-life problems, but will give a diverse group of US students an insight into industrial research and provide them with hands-on experience of working on industrial problems. One of the goals of the program is to make the students aware of the multiple career pathways open to them and highlight the value and adaptability of their mathematics skills as applied to interesting real-life problems. The students will also receive invaluable experience collaborating with foreign colleagues and companies. The projects will be the natural outgrowth of MODAL's existing industry research partnerships, and will be selected in collaboration with IPAM. Participants will produce a final report on their work, and will be encouraged to submit their work for conference presentations and/or publication in technical journals. It is expected that many of the participants will continue the research and collaborations they started in the program. Applied mathematics research has become increasingly important and relevant to engineering problems and, indeed, to everyday life. Increasingly, core applied mathematics topics, ranging from applied probability, to partial differential equation, to optimization, find important applications in areas such as materials science, mathematical biology, operations research, and, more recently, machine learning. Applications of mathematical techniques to real-life problems require both a deep understanding of mathematical theory, as well as acute awareness of both the physical and technical aspects of the problem, as well as implementation details of any numerical algorithms or simulations. For this reason, such successful applications are often a combination of individual and team efforts, with the main problem being divided into more specialized parts, and specific expertise of each team member brought to bear on each such component.The exact topics of the research projects will change from year to year and will depend on the interest of industry and academic researchers involved. Generally speaking, the projects will apply mathematical techniques to questions of optimization (such as optimization of rail network throughput), efficient simulation (such as simulation of modern nanophotonic devices) and machine learning (such as analysis of medical mass data sets). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.