Sorted by category:

Numerical Analysis

The launch of ChatGPT made the world aware that Machine Learning will fundamentally change the way we live and work. The field of computing and simulation will be no exception. But it’s not just ChatGPT: there are other innovations from machine learning that are bringing exciting changes for computing. In this blog, we’ll explore the potential of this new technology.

Bas van ’t Hof from VORtech helped brain researchers by building software to compute how drugs spread through the brain. With this software, the researchers can now see what their theoretical work implies, allowing for more efficient drug development with fewer laboratory animals.

Model-order reduction is a powerful technique to speed up simulations. It can be used to solve performance issues in applications like design optimization, model-based predictive control, or digital twinning. In this blog, we’ll give a very basic introduction to these techniques and describe some experiments that were done at VORtech by two interns at VORtech, Floris Roodenburg and Abinash Mishra. They could speed up calculations by more than a factor of ten.

In the simulation of physical processes, some important physical property may get lost due to the computational method. For example, energy loss can be introduced in a simulation of a process that is not supposed to lose energy. Recently, we published new computational methods that avoid such problems. These conservative discretizations conserve certain physical quantities like mass, momentum, and energy. Or all at the same time. This means that our methods make simulations more accurate and more reliable.

Burn injuries can have a radical impact on someone’s quality of life. A burn injury in the neck, for example, can cause a contraction that makes it impossible for someone to lift his or her head. Complications such as hypertrophic scars and contractions can occur as the result of burn injuries. In the first-place, hypertrophic scars cause aesthetic problems. In the case of hypertrophy, the scar is thicker and more elevated than normal. The second class of complications, an excessive contraction, often causes reduced mobility of the joint of the patient.

Automatic trading, portfolio optimization, and insurance valuation were the topics of the first part of this blog. In this second part, we will further discuss the added value of technical experts in finance. We do this by looking at how credit data can be managed at banks, how algorithms can help to prevent future credit crises, and how data science can provide insights into mortgage loans. These three financial topics are very different at first glance. But they have some common parts: they benefit from a technical engineering solution, through mathematical techniques and scientific software.

Simulation of the world around us by numerical computation has improved a lot in the past decades. Together with Johan Dijkzeul we will look back at this period.

The forty-second Woudschoten Conference was held at the Woudschoten Conference Centre, Zeist, The Netherlands from 4-6 October 2017.

The propagation of waves through a medium is described by the famous wave equation. This is a partial differential equation that is not easy to solve. The time-independent form of the wave equation is called the Helmholtz equation.

This year the Study Group Mathematics with Industry took place in Amsterdam, from January 23 till 27. Bas van ‘t Hof and Jok Tang, two of VORtech’s mathematical consultants, attended the SWI this year.