August 26-28, 2008

10th Anniversary EURANDOM

During the workshop
A Random Tour through a Decade of Research
the founders of EURANDOM, former postdocs and speakers from science and industry  looked back onto 10 years of EURANDOM forward to new developments. 

After an informal discussion (summary on the right) on the first afternoon, former postdocs were speakers during all the talks of the second day (August 27): Samuli Aalto,  Federico Camia, Peter Grünwald, Johan van Leeuwaarden, Franz Merkl and Jian Zhang.

 

Summary of the Alumni meeting during the 10th anniversary of EURANDOM

 The subject of the panel discussion was : "New developments towards the future of Stochastics, combined with "Is Eurandom doing the right things right ? "
Around 25 participants interesting mix of alumni, postdocs, PhD students. The meeting  started very lively by provoking statements of the three panel members : Francesca Nardi, Richard Boucherie and Geurt Jongbloed :

1. There is no future for stochastic modelling and analysis because the growth of computing power and memory capacity will soon make every problem solvable by simulation.

2. Statistical software packages are dangerous tools in the hands of laymen and often lead to false conclusions .

3. The growing length of mathematical papers makes refereeing not only a very time consuming job but is also an indication that real grand breakthroughs are over :  fine tuning is all that  will be left.

Results of the discussion :

Analysis and mathematical modelling gives insights that black box simulation never can present. Developing (statistical or probabilistic) intuition and understanding of transferability (a.o. via abstraction) of methods to different application areas  do not emerge with just simulation.

The growth in length of mathematical papers is, apart from "l’art pour l’art" tendencies and bad mathematical papers,  mostly caused by the difficult real life problems we try to tackle/model.

If reality is complex then certainly at the start modelling will also lead to a complex description. Real breakthroughs come every ten to fifty , sometimes hundred years. So one has to be patient there.

All thought that the EURANDOM approach (define broad research areas with senior people and try to fill themes in  these areas by finding and hiring quality postdocs and PhD students who are interested to work on that theme) it was the best one. It was suggested that the workload of senior people in finding and hiring could be alleviated by making better use of already present postdocs and alumni.

Wim Senden

  P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB  Eindhoven, The Netherlands
tel. +31 40 2478100  fax +31 40 2478190  
  e-mail: office@eurandom.tue.nl