2. About Me...
• Undergraduate Masters (MMath)
• EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical
Applied Mathematics
3. My interest:
• Summer Placements
My current experiences:
• MMath Project
• ITT2
Industrial Maths
4. • Looked at several Industrial Maths Case Studies to see the
scope and the importance of industrial maths
• Looked at current interaction of maths and industry and
learnt about study groups and the many organisations that
exist to aid bringing maths and industry together
MMath Project – Part 1
5. • RDS wanted to know if Video Odometry could be used to
find the position of a train
MMath Project – Part 2
Arclength &
Curvature
6. What went well?
• Loved seeing the variety of industrial maths problems
• Great to be introduced to all of the groups that work with industry and
academia
• Part 2 gave me an idea of what doing a PhD would be like
What would I have improved?
• More time
• Direct contact with industrialists
MMath Project – My views
7. • Over 60 academics, students and industrialists came
together for a week of collaboration
• Had presentations from Électricité de France (EDF) and
Amec Foster Wheeler
ITT2 - Overview
8. We aimed to build a ‘physical’ model for energy demand...
ITT2 – Our group’s work with EDF
9. What went well?
• The mix of people
• The amount of time
What would I have improved?
• More initial preparation
ITT2 – My views
How come I became interested in industrial maths?
- Always had an interest in applications, especially mechanical engineering (Influence from my Dad)
- Worked at RR for two summers – loved learning about the application as well as seeing how maths was being used
- I’m not content with just doing maths – found it far more interesting (and easier to understand) if I had examples in the real world
What experiences have I had?
- A semester long (11 weeks) project with Chris Budd in my final year of Undergrad on “What is Industrial Mathematics?”
- Second integrative think tank: a week long event run by SAMBa which was compulsory for the first cohort.
I was invited to join to see what it was like as I had already been offered my place in the course by then.
Examples:
Using Finite Element methods to look at balancing rotating machinery
Modelling shopper behaviour
Predicting rogue waves (Have to use non-linear methods)
Using knot theory to identify a family of knots that appear in DNA parcels
Optimal trip planning in the presence of random delay
The logos are not comprehensive and are in no particular order so hopefully I won’t offend anyone by missing some out!!
Video camera in the front on the train cab, takes photos of the track
Use image registration to align neighbouring frames
Use the average measured difference between the photo pixels to calculate curvature and arclength
This is the piece I did
I found a mistake in the industrialists calculations as they took a wrong transformation of coordinates in their calculation of curvature
Created a more accurate version
These “intrinsic” coordinates can be used to plot curvature signatures of the track...
Conclusions:
Curvature signatures is not enough to find the trains position along due to the nature of the tracks (they’re straight)
Very good for picking out things like changes of track so this could be paired with something like a digital mapPS to get positioning
I really enjoyed seeing the variety of industrial maths problems as it was exciting to see what I could end up doing in the future
It was great to learn about all the companies that work with academics and industry partners as beforehand I either hadn’t heard of them or didn’t fully understand what they did
Part 2 gave me an idea of what doing a PhD would be like as at the time I wasn’t sure if that was the right path for me
I would have liked to have had more time on the project because we barely scratched the surface of the train problem and there were lots more directions I’d have liked to have taken it.
I think that direct contact with the industry involved would have been a bonus. It would have been helpful to fully understand what they would like out of the project and been useful to see things from their point of view as well as the point of view of accademia
Amec and EDF gave presentations on their current work and areas that they’d like to improve
We broke into mixed groups to brainstorm possible ways forward on both problems and collected all of this information together to form areas where we might want to explore further
The students then chose which “mini project” they wanted to work on and the academics joined particular groups or floated over many
The industrialists’ floated over all the groups that were working on their problems so they were always around to answer questions
EDF uses statisical models to predict energy demand but these use historical data and so aren’t useful in predicting the load in cases where there is no data i.e. New technologies like electric cars
We wanted to build a model that had a physical interpretation to the parameters so that we could perform analysis of situations where there is no data
We used networks to create on ODE for the proportion of the population awake at certain times of the day
We analysed the temperature data and found it had a quadractic trend
We created an extremely simple model based on these 2 pieces of information and discovered that is estimated the overall trend of the energy load reasonably well
- It was really good working with a mix of academics and industrialists, it made the environment very supportive and it meant that the progress was reasonably quick
I think a week was the right length of time. It was fast paced but it was good for staring projects. Any more research would be looked at on a longer time scale...
It was good fun and made me realise that this was exactly the type of thing I’d like to do later on in life
At the time I felt under-prepared because I had gone into the week with little prior knowledge... However, SAMBa students get preparation for the ITTs and get to see and think about the problems in preparation and SAMBa students run an information session for other attendees where they pass on what they’ve learnt. (I was on holiday when this happened so I couldn’t but I still was amazed at what I achieved during the week)
Overall I think it is great to expose undergrads to the world of research in industrial applied maths because in my case it has helped guide me into the area that I really want to work in.
Any questions?
