A Congregation of Applied Math Minds
Recap of the 3rd Annual Northern and Central California SIAM meetup
On October 26-27, UC Davis hosted NCC26, the 3rd Annual meeting of the Northern and Central California Section of SIAM. The two plenary talks were given by Stefan Wild from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Sunčiča Canic from UC Berkeley. Stefan Wild's talk, titled Reinforcement Learning and Adaptive Subspace Assisted Zeroth-Order Optimization Solvers for Improved Robustness, provided an overview of the speaker's joint work with Pengcheng Xie and Kwassi Joseph Dzahini on zeroth-order optimization solvers. The work exhibits adaptive algorithms that show great promise due to their scalability for large dimensional problems and because they extend to non-stationary cases.
In an entirely different vein, the plenary lecture by Sunčiča Canic from UC Berkeley, titled From Nonlinear PDEs to Bioartificial Organs: Mathematics of Fluid–Poroelastic Interaction, delved into a discussion of incompressible fluid flow, membrane mechanics, and numerical simulation of fluid–poroelastic structure interaction (FPSI) involving multilayered poroelastic media. The talk described joint work with S. Roy, Y. Wang, M. Bukač, J. Kuan, J. Webster, L. Bociu, and B. Muha. Time-dependent incompressible Navier-Stokes equations provide the basic model for incompressible fluid flow. Within this model, blood flow is coupled to a multilayered Biot-type poroelastic structure. This poroelastic structure represents semipermeable nanopore membranes and a cell-containing hydrogel. A bioartificial pancreas (BAP) provides the metabolic control that benefits type 1 diabetes patients. One motivation for the work described in the talk involves the development of an implantable bioartificial pancreas, one that could function without immunosuppressant therapy.
In addition to special sessions on topics ranging from Fluid Mechanics, Computation in a variety of forms, Inverse Problems, Machine Learning, Partial Differential Equations, and Mathematical Biology, there were several panel discussions on topics of current interest. Of particular note was the Special Session on October 26 honoring Mariel Vazquez, with talks devoted to her mathematical legacy given by Chris Soteros, Nata\v{s}a Jonoska, and Koya Shimokawa. A Memorial Service for our late colleague was held the following day and, while of interest to many of the participants, was not part of NCC26.