|
European Atelier for Engineering and Computational Science - EUA4X
The situation of the project after its first year
| Type of funding: |
Marie Curie Conferences and Training Courses (contract # MSCF-CT-2004-013336) |
| Kick-off: |
|
| Duration: |
36 months |
| TCN Consortium’s reference person: |
Giorgio Fotia |
|
The EUA4X (European Atelier for Engineering and Computational Sciences) is a three years project (2005-2007) financed by European Union Marie Curie Conferences and Training Courses (contract # MSCF-CT-2004-013336). EUA4X offers a European wide training environment for the carrier development of young researchers through a coherent programme of conferences, training courses, lecture series and workshops. To preserve and structure the know how, a strong use of virtual events will be made, to make the outcomes of the project available for the development of competences of a larger community during the project and far beyond.
The Atelier is designed to promote both the trans-national training of junior researchers and to disseminate among scientists complementary approaches for multidisciplinary applications in the area of applied scientific computing and its applications to a wide number of problems that are currently at the forefront of research. The programme of events tackles both enabling technologies in the field of scientific computing (numerical grid generation, finite elements, finite difference and finite volume methods, higher order methods) and a number of important applications (flow processes, design of new materials, subsurface flow, aero-acoustics, agro-food technology, large scale industrial applications) to advance knowledge in a wide range of technical processes and physical phenomena of very high social interest.
|
|
Courses, workshops, lecture series and conferences have attracted a great interest among young researchers coming from universities, research centres and industries throughout Europe, contributing to the achievement of important objectives of the project, such as to promote European researchers mobility and to favour knowledge dissemination.
The project and partner activities are supported by the EUA4X web site (www.eua4x.net), which not only constitutes an informative tool to access documents and materials, but also an exchange and integration platform for the people attending the courses, the faculty and the project training offer, becoming a place for gathering and developing the community.
|
|
The events, organized by the project partners in 2005 in different European countries, have created the first contacts for a common and shared network, necessary for the construction of an European scientific community within the engineering and computational sciences sector, which is another ambitious objective of the project.
2006, the second year of the project, was marked by several activities: 12 events, including Training Courses, Lecture Series and Conferences, with more than 200 fellowships offered to young researchers and the collaboration of numerous international acknowledged lecturers, coming from both the academic and the industrial world. The support of also other students and qualified researchers was essential for the success of the events. Besides the on-site ones, other complementary activities were carried out in relation to the E-Atelier (http://www.eua4x.net/e-atelier), currently in progress.
The E-Atelier has been conceived as a tool to guarantee the accessibility to the project events and activities and a wider diffusion of the related materials, without geographic and time limits.
The aim of the E-Atelier is the dissemination of the most advanced knowledge and technologies in computational engineering, through the use of web tools, favouring an easy sharing. It consists of two linked parts: the Virtual School and the NGGD (Numerical Grid Generation Dictionary), an on-line encyclopaedic dictionary for a terminological assessment within the numerical grid generation context (http://www.eua4x.net/e-atelier/nggd).
The main core of the E-Atelier is the Virtual School (http://www.eua4x.net/e-atelier/virtualschool), that is the on-line publication of the courses carried out during the EUA4X activities. To this end, the project web site (www.eua4x.net) has been integrated with the improve.it e-learning platform (http://www.improve.it), which uses Moodle as Open Source Management System, specifically designed for on-line training courses.
At present the available courses are the following ones: the Lecture Series organized by H. Deconinck and M. Ricchiuto - VKI: “High Order Discretization Methods for Computational Physics”; the Training Course: “Advanced Finite Element Methods for Continuum Mechanics”, organized by G. Fotia and A. Pandolfi – TCN Consortium; the Training Course organized by R. Maria Spitaleri and F. Pistella - CNR-IAC: “State of the Art in Numerical Grid Generation: from Theory to Practice”; as well as the conferences presented during the EUA4X 2005 Annual Conference, organized by G. Fotia and C. Marras – TCN Consortium.
The events have proved the good concept and the efforts behind the EUA4X: the creation of a community within the computational engineering and the numerical simulation sectors, the teachers and students synergy and the possibility of a knowledge development though sharing and contact.
|
