After preparing and giving three talks I had quite some pressure to produce results for the upcomming conference season. So no relaxing semester break but using this time where most students, bosses and colleagues are on holiday for concentrated working.
The good thing (in retrospect) was that I again had to write a paper. The first event was the OIPE, the 10th Workshop on Optimization and Inverse Problems in Electromagnetism from 14. to 17. September 2008 in Ilmenau. My submitted two page digest was my first peer reviewed work and it is published in the proceedings. I gave a poster presentation and it was a interesting event - that brought me also further in my subject. It's always good to see that also the others cook only with water:) The OIPE offered the possibility to submit a paper for review and publication in a journal. This gave the pressure but on the other hand was writing down the stuff essential to understand what my results actually mean (again).
The next step was the annual meeting of the research program where my project is a part of. We met in Kloster Banz, a huge former monastry known where politicians meet in conclave. It's one of the places I would not have visited otherwise and it was pretty cool to stroll around this place at night. A highlight was the guitar performance of two mathematicians with funny and ironic lyrics about beeing a mathematician. :)
And after that there was the Fourth International Workshop Direct and Inverse Problems in Piezoelectricity in a impressive castle (Pommersfelden). Here is the talk.
With the first PhD year beeing a starting year, scientific workshops where too early. Now I feel like becomming part of the "community" (also I still have no active contact to other groups doing SIMP optimization). With the good time one has at these conferences it's kind of sad that suddenly it's towards the end of the PhD time.
I have really cool results (with pretty cool 3D images with colors, transparency and all this stuff). I shall blog about this soon.
