Waterloo hosts Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society conference

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

CAIMS 2021 conference Waterloo
The Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (CAIMS) hosts its annual meeting and conference this week, June 21-24, at the University of Waterloo. Faculty members from the Department of Applied Mathematics organized the virtual conference.

Conference papers include new work in mathematics related to health, technology, finance and other fields. Numerous conference papers focus on topics related to COVID19, examining the pandemic from perspectives including media coverage, the role of artificial intelligence, mobility data, and epidemiology.

“The academic community has been very active in analysis and investigation of things that could help with the current crisis,” says Brian Ingalls, a professor of applied mathematics and one of the organizing committee members. “Epidemiology, for example, has a mathematical side and a social science side. The mathematical side of epidemiology, the modelling side, has always been well-represented within the CAIMS community.”

The proliferation of COVID19 papers at CAIMS 2021, Ingalls continues, “blossomed out of a core of activity in mathematical epidemiology that has been a significant part of the Canadian community all along.”

Plenary speakers at the conference include Stefanie Jegelka of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), speaking on graph neural networks, and Arup Chakraborty (MIT), speaking on vaccine strategies for mutable pathogens.

While the conference headlines some of the top researchers in applied mathematics, CAIMS features several sessions specifically for young Canadian researchers and a virtual poster session.

“A lot of the meeting is about providing opportunities for junior researchers to present their work, to get some experience with those presentation skills, and to do some networking in terms of what their next steps might be,” says Ingalls.

CAIMS 2021 sponsors include the University of Waterloo, the Fields Institute, and York University. Visit the website for CAIMS 2021 for more information.