Proceedings of the Seventh PIMS - MITACS

The annual PIMS Graduate Industrial Math Modelling Camp (GIMMC) is held in one of the PIMS universities as part of the PIMS industrial programme. It is part of PIMS' commitment to providing training for young mathematical scientists who are either pursing careers in academia or in industry. The goal of the GIMMC is to provide experience in the use of mathematical modelling as a problem-solving tool for graduate students in mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics and computer science. In addition to this it helps prepare them for the Industrial Problem Solving Workshop which takes place the week after GIMMC. At the workshop students work together in teams, under the supervision of invited mentors. Each mentor poses a problem arising from an industrial or engineering application and guides his or her team of graduate students through a modelling phase to a resolution. There were six problems posed, with a total of 40 students in attendance. The students mainly came from across North America with 7 from the United States and 3 international students. My sincere appreciation and gratitude goes to all the people involved in this workshop. In particular I would like to thank the organisers (Rex Westbrook, Kes Salkauskas), the local organising committee (David Leeming, Reinhard Illner, Pauline van den Driessche, Julie Zhou) and the industrial mentors (C., forty-five graduate students and six mentors gathered at the University of Victoria for the Seventh Graduate Industrial Mathematical Modelling Camp (GIMMC). The students came from universities across Canada, the United States, Austria and Korea. The single Austrian and two Korean students were sponsored by their home countries. It was rewarding to be part of the second GIMMC held at the University of Victoria, where the first one took place in 1998. Through GIMMC and the Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held the following week at the University of British Columbia, the group had excellent exposure to a variety of industrial mathematics modelling problems. The participants arrived on Sunday, May 9 and that evening were hosted at a welcoming reception at the UVic Graduate Centre. They were also given a brief tour of the UVic campus. Monday morning, the participants were officially welcomed to UVic by Dr. Martin Taylor, Vice President Research. This was followed by brief presentations of the problems by the six mentors. Immediately afterwards they broke into teams to tackle the problems. Again this year an excellent group of mentors challenged and …