Conference: East Coast Optimization Meeting 2025 (ECOM25)

The fifth East Coast Optimization Meeting (ECOM) will occur on April 17-18, 2025, at George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia. The goal of ECOM is to introduce students and early-career researchers to current trends in optimization as well as to provide a strong networking environment between academia, industry, and the national laboratories. The focus of this fifth meeting will be on the role of optimization for Digital Twins.

Digital Twins are expected to have a significant impact on science, engineering, and society. For instance, it is anticipated that they will lead to new developments in identifying weaknesses in structures such as bridges, nuclear plants, and wind turbines. Digital Twins of human organs have the potential to lead to cures of diseases that have long eluded researchers.

The variety of topics to be discussed in the meeting such as stochastic optimization, modeling, partial differential equations, and risk averse optimization are also of much wider interest beyond Digital Twins. The meeting will also provide a unique opportunity for graduate students, postdocs and other early career scientists to take courses from two leading researchers in modeling, optimization, and scientific computing.

ECOM speakers and participants will study the key question of how to best utilize optimization to combine physics-based and data-driven models. This approach, when carried out for the entire complex physical system, for its lifetime, can be termed a "Digital Twin." One of the critical components of a Digital Twin, which distinguishes it from classical modeling, is the use of data over the entire lifetime of the physical system to update the Digital Twin.

Subsequently, Digital Twins bring together several research areas in mathematics, including modeling, analysis, control, optimization, numerical analysis, and scientific computing. New algorithmic developments are expected in these areas and this workshop aims to dive deeper into the topics relevant to Digital Twins: optimization constrained by simulation, optimization under uncertainty, and inexact optimization algorithms.

A particular focus of this workshop will be the identification and development of benchmark applications and software implementation. The tutorials and invited talks will focus on consequential problems and will discuss state-of-the-art optimization solvers to handle these problems. As a result, the attendees will be equipped to tackle a new set of challenging problems. More details can be found at the conference website: https://math.gmu.edu/~hantil/ECOM/2025/

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.