Workshops are an important mechanism for stimulating new ideas and collaborative projects. The wide span of connections in its scientific and industrial base enables the KTN to boost the effectiveness of workshops by bringing together a critical mass of participants with expertise and experience to ensure beneficial outcomes.

The KTN recognises the importance of workshops in promoting new activity, both in strategic terms (supporting innovation policy and planning) and tactically (meeting specific business challenges).

Strategy Workshops assist the business community and the Technology Strategy Board to develop strategic priorities either by contributing to thinking in themes identified by the Technology Strategy Board, such as its Innovation Platform areas, or by gathering evidence for the strategic importance of innovation in new areas. The purpose of such workshops is to clarify how mathematics can help.

Science and Technology Workshops serve the KTN community in a more tactical and immediate way. The intention here is to push science and technology forward in alignment with industry needs. These workshops are steered by the industrial participants bringing challenges from new and existing application areas.

To find out more about KTN workshops or to discuss your ideas for forthcoming workshops, contact Dr Melvin Brown.

Optimisation of expensive functions

"The workshop succeeded very well in meeting its objectives. With the input from the Mathematics KTN we were able to assemble a varied and high quality set of speakers and the professional facilitation of the meeting helped ensure this success." - Chris Farmer, formerly Schlumberger

A science and technology workshop on optimisation of expensive functions was held in 2008. The workshop focussed on hard industrial problems in optimisation where the high computational cost of each function evaluation is a barrier to the use of standard techniques. The workshop provided an opportunity for industrialists and academics to share experience and knowledge of approaches.

The agenda included a diverse range of industrial presentations on oil reservoir simulation, weather forecasting, car design, aircraft design and shopping basket analysis. A keynote presentation described the state of the art in the science base underpinning the design and optimisation of engineering systems. The presentations stimulated a facilitated discussion in which participants examined key differences and similarities between hard optimisation problems in different application domains.

The workshop was initially motivated by the findings of a CASE project sponsored by Schlumberger. KTN associate Jari Fowkes is studying for a DPhil at Oxford on optimising oilfield operations using oil reservoir simulation and optimisation theory. The workshop provided an excellent opportunity for him to present his research and further understand its relevance to a wide range of industrial challenges.