Live from Inverse Days 2015: baby on board

This week I did something a little crazy, dictated by necessity: I took my 2 year old girl to a conference, namely the Inverse Days in Lappeenranta. We drove from Espoo (bad idea) on Monday evening and will stay until Thursday, cutting at half day to get home not too late.

Baby-wise it went much better than I expected: she played, slept and watched cartoon and I was able to listen to almost all talks. I could even present my own during her afternoon nap (slides to be found here).

Science-wise, I heard about many interesting projects. Inverse Days is the annual meeting of the Inverse Problems research community in Finland. Since it's a great chance to get to know all ongoing projects in Finland, there are often guests from abroad as well. Since 2010, I have been missing only one meeting, because of my parental leave. The dominant theme this year has been EIT, on which many groups in Finland are working at the moment.

For me, the highlight has been a nice presentation by Lauri Harhanen from DTU. He started last May in the huge ongoing project HD-Tomo and he's working on an interesting optimization of gradient descent minimization methods, based on physical modelling of material a priori information in CT. When I will upgrade to real data, this could be a fruitful improvement of my framework.

During the conference, we also had the second meeting of Women in Inverse Problems, a small network started one year ago. We agreed that it would be nice to have some statistics (local or nation-wide) on presence of women in mathematics, and investigate on reasons why the disproportion is created. Let's hope we can follow up on this idea. At the moment our most active action is a small mailing list, where we share interesting events or discussion topics (drop me an email if you want to join, since it's closed).

It's been nice to be at Inverse Days once again and I also realised that this was my first talk at this event. See you soon, Lappeenranta!

Cutest attendee ever.
Cutest attendee ever.

Paola Elefante

Digital Scaling Project Manager at Plan International. Proud mother & wife. Shameless nerd&geek. Feminist. Undercover gourmet.

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