Left to right: Professor P.F. Hodnett, CAMS; Professor A. Acrivos, CCNY; Professor M. Wallace, CAMS.

In June 1998 the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) conducted the workshop "Uncertainty Management and Assessment" and, according to the December 1998 issue of the SIAM news, the workshop report "argues for the need to understand and, to the extent possible, to explicitly represent and quantify all sources of uncertainty in models and simulation". Meeting this challenge will inevitably require increased collaboration between applied mathe-maticians and statisticians.

The Centre for Applied Mathe-matical Sciences (CAMS) was formed in 1998 and is a research centre comprised of applied mathematicians and statisticians working under the major unifying theme of mathematical modelling. CAMS has identified the analysis of uncertainty in models of physical processes as a major research theme. The members of CAMS fall naturally into two groups – the Applied Mathematics group and the Applied Statistics group.

The Applied Mathematics group has research interests in fluid mechanics and transport phenomena, geophysical flows, industrial flows, singular perturbation problems and convection-diffusion problems. Current topics include modelling the large scale ocean circulation, baroclinic instability in the ocean, flow over bottom topography, dynamics of strong eddies, stability of large scale atmospheric waves, modelling the thin viscous flow which occurs during the coating of substrates, mechanisms for episodic subduction on Venus, and finite difference and adaptive computational meshes.

The Applied Statistics group is engaged in research in geostatistics, survival analysis, Bayesian smoothing, epidemiology, meta-analysis, spatial data, hierarchical modelling, image analysis, reliability and process control. Current topics include manpower planning in the Irish Public Service, sequential analysis applied to reliability testing, Bayesian methods for meta-analysis of epidemiological studies, frailty models for repeat accident data in Dublin Bus, Markov chain models for caries clinical trial data, Bayesian methods for smoothing disease incidence rates over time and space, and the analysis of gait patterns from sensory motion detectors.

The recent appointment of Andrew Fowler, Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as Adjunct Professor at UL is a major boost for CAMS. Fowler is a leading world figure in Applied Mathematics and will visit regularly with a view to developing research links. A Visitors’ Programme involving visits to UL by leading researchers in the fields of Applied Mathematics and Statistics has been initiated. A recent visitor was Professor A. Acrivos who is Director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics at City College, City University of New York (CCNY) and former editor of Physics of Fluids.

Contact: Professor Don Barry;
E-mail: don.barry@ul.ie