General information

What is a Study Group with Industry?

A Study Group is a forum for industrialists to work alongside established academic researchers, postdocs and postgraduate students on problems of direct industrial importance. Workshops of this nature have taken place in the United Kingdom for a number of years, going back to 1968 when the first Oxford Study Group with Industry was organised. Study Groups have forged links that have led to many long-term collaborations providing feedback, knowledge transfer, and ideas exchange.

The success of the Study Groups' unique format, using problems presented by industry as the basis for fundamental academic research, is shown by their spread in the USA, Canada, Africa, China, India, Australia and Asia. As Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and the Netherlands have embraced the Study Group format, the UK events have become the central component of a wider European series that is called the European Study Group with Industry and is governed by the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry. If the research institutions and industrial companies in Russia can adopt the Study Group format and become an integral part of the global network, it will lead to a truly world coverage. For the first Russian Study Group we also have the goal to bridge the gap between Russian industries and Russian universities and to set up an unbiased objective way of establishing future directions of interdisciplinary fundamental researches in natural sciences.

Scope

Study Groups provides a forum for:
• Exploiting the expertise of leading academic researchers to find solutions to industrial problems
• Clarifying and clearly formulating a problem
• Bringing new perspectives and fresh ideas
• Brainstorming on mechanisms and methodologies
• Finding state-of-the-art solution procedures

Study Group Format

• The week-long workshop attracts researchers and engineers from a wide range of backgrounds to work on the selected industrial problems.
• On the first day the industrial representatives outline their project and their objectives.
• The next three of days are devoted to brainstorming, modelling and solving the problems closely guided by the industrial representative. Participants are free to apply their expertise to any of the projects.
• On the last day the progress and recommended routes forward are presented.
• Reports on the problem deliberations are produced after the meeting. (Some reports from previous study groups are available at http://miis.maths.ox.ac.uk/past/)
• A training course runs concurrently with the workshop providing wider background material on new research topics related to the industrial problems.

Benefits to Industry

• Found solutions and insights into existing industrial problems
• Established lasting and productive working links with academic researchers
• Raised and investigated research issues of long-term significance
• Expanded employment opportunities and company profiles with postgraduate students
• Enhancement of company visibility

Benefits to Academia

• New industry inspired ideas and challenges for both research and education
• New interdisciplinary contacts with international researchers and productive working links with commercial companies and funding bodies
• Stimulating greater awareness in the wider community of the power of science in general and mathematical and numerical modelling in particular in providing innovation and solution paths to real-world problems

Information for Companies

There are no limitations to the problem areas that can be approached by mathematical and numerical modelling. The sort of problems that study groups in Britain, continental Europe, the US and Australia have investigated range from bioscience, nanotechnology and green power to management of stock surplus, GPS in a shopping mall, message delivery in wireless networks and traffic safety control. If you are interested in presenting a problem to the Study Group, we would be delighted to hear from you. If your project is selected for consideration, you will have to write a detailed description of the problem and present it at the first day of the Study Group. We expect that the company representative be present during the whole week to guide the academic participants through the particulars of the problem under investigation.

There will be no charge for bringing problems to this Study Group since it is the inaugural event in Russia. However, we expect the industry to help defray some of the expenses.

How to Participate

There is no fee to attend the Study Group but you need to register at http://isgi.hse-inc.ru. There are limited funds available to cover accommodation and travel costs. If you would like to be considered for such funding, in support of your enquiry please submit a brief case to the Organising Committee.