WCSMO-11 is over

Some time passed since the last WCSMO-11 which was held in Sydney in June 2015. Still I know of no regular conference which comes any close to the World Congress of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization. The first OPTi in 2014 held in Kos came close but I see no hint that OPTi will be continued.

To my opinion people were (in the beginning) not happy to travel as far as Australia for a conference - something like the place with the furthest traveling distance for almost everyone I meet at conferences. 

And indeed I missed some participants from the US and Europe where on the other side many speakers came from China. The total number of participant also was a little below the previous numbers. 

I personally was disappointed by the average quality of the presentations. The two worst presentations I attended were from the US and Europe and I had the impression that both speakers did not even understand / could handle the SIMP method at the level of the 99 lines code. But there were more disappointing talks. To my personal opinion there are not too much groups worldwide driving topology optimization further with solid research while there are still plenty of challenging issues and problems, which can be solved by topology optimization. I cannot compare this against the previous WCSMO’s due to too many parallel sessions and I regularly missed some important talks. 

So maybe it would be a good idea to reduce the number of presentations and increase the average quality for the WCSMO but concurrently introduce regional conferences where PhD students have the opportunity to present their works and more importantly can come into contact to their regional experts, especially when they don’t stem from one of the established groups.

My highlight of the WCSMO was the high-performance optimization done at the DTU and I very much acknowledge that they contribute the PETSc base implementation with a parallel linear elasticity, MMA, density filter and PDE filter. More on that in a separate blog post. 

To summarize, the WCSMO-11 2015 in Sydney was again not only a good conference but almost the only conference (to my knowledge) for structural optimization. It was well organized; it was pretty cool to have a conference banquet at “Hogwarts” (the great hall of the University of Sydney). I personally also enjoyed Sydney and my short trip to the Blue Mountains.

What I really missed was that there was no possibility to just sit (and talk) when I did not want to attend a presentation. There was nothing like a lobby or close cafeteria. Especially when it was cold and raining and one could not go outside.