After successful events in Eindhoven in 2022 and Delft in 2023, this year's annual 4TU.AMI summer event took place at the University of Twente on 7 June 2024.
Around 60 people registered for the event. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more than half of the participants were affiliated with the University of Twente, but the universities of Delft, Eindhoven, Wageningen, Groningen and Nijmegen were also well-represented.
Scientific director Johann Hurink opened the meeting and welcomed the participants. Ellen van den Bos (program manager of 4TU.AMI and organiser of this event) shared some practical information with the participants, before Marjolein Dohmen-Janssen (secretary of the 4TU.Federation) gave a brief summary of the activities of the 4TU.Federation.
The first invited speaker of the day was Johannes Schmidt-Hieber, a professor of Statistics at the University of Twente. He was recently awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant entitled 'From A to B: Generalizing the mathematics of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to biological neural networks (BNNs) (A2B)'. In his talk, Johannes surveyed several biologically inspired learning rules, presented some first results of the research carried out in the context of his grant, and outlined the mathematical challenges that lie ahead.
As always, a significant part of the summer event's program was reserved for short pitches by 4TU.AMI researchers and lecturers. After all, one of 4TU.AMI's core activities is to "contribute to community building and to provide a platform for sharing experiences and inspiring colleagues". Several of these pitches were devoted to 4TU.AMI's ongoing Strategic Research Initiatives (SRIs).
After lunch and a group photo, Madeleine de Smaele and Roel Janssen gave a presentation about 4TU.ResearchData, a data and software repository for science, engineering and design domains, as well as support services and a vibrant community around them. 4TU.ResearchData staff is responsible for managing and maintaining the data repository, including its preservation policy to guarantee long-term usability of the data it holds. The repository currently contains around 10.000 data sets. Anyone interested in improving the creation and reuse of FAIR data within the technical sciences, whether or not affiliated with one of the 4TUs, is invited to join.
The second invited speaker of the day was Annoesjka Cabo (TUD). She heads the recently initiated 'Mathematics Education Research Project' (MEReP), one of 4TU.AMI's Strategic Research Initiatives. In her talk, Annoesjka introduced the team and explained the objectives of this SRI. She spoke about so-called mathematical competencies and the current state of research of these competencies. In an interactive part of her talk, audience members were asked to answer several questions, for example about what mathematical skills and competencies they expect our students to need most in the future.
After another round of short pitches, the third invited speaker of the day took to the stage. Mireille Boutin, who joined the TU/e in January 2024 as a professor in the Discrete Algebra and Geometry group, gave a talk entitled 'Discrete object recognition and symmetry detection'. She explained that problems such as determining if two objects have the same shape or reconstructing the shape of a room from echoes boils down to the problem of characterizing the orbits of the action of a Lie group on a manifold, before discussing how invariants can be used to solve such problems.
After Johann Hurink closed the official part of the event, the participants enjoyed drinks and a buffet dinner on the sunny terrace of the Vrijhof.
