From the 22th to 25th of March, the 16th EMMC congress was held in Nantes. The range of topics covered by the congress was wide, involving subjects related to material modeling. The congress was done in the Congress City of Nantes, a place specialized in holding those kind of events. People coming from different parts of the world were gathered in the congress to discuss and share the newest ideas in the field. Due to the large amount of participants coming to the event, up to 8 parallel sessions were active at the same time.
There were plenty of interesting talks in the conference, I learned some problematic that the experimentalists are facing nowadays, like model calibration and error measurement among others. However, the session that captured my attention the most was the one related to model order reduction, mainly because is the subject of my PhD thesis. Roughly speaking, this topic could be seen as a branch of computational mechanics, where simulations are speeded up to achieve either real time constraints or computational cost reduction. It goes without saying that the beauty of model order reduction is to achieve such constraints while keeping an admissible level of accuracy. In this very same session, Giacomo and me had the chance of showing our latest results. From my point of view, it is always a pleasure to meet the people involved in your research field.
Moreover, we had the chance of visiting the Nantes machine’s museum during the second day of the conference. Inside the museum there are several machines made of metal imitating both movements and appearances of different animals. For instance, a metallic elephant strolls each half an hour in the vicinity of the museum, carrying children plenty of happiness. A giant spider is able to climb till the roof, moving her eight legs separately. The movements of those machines is accomplished by a complex system of engine and gears allowing the machine to move like the animal in the real life. Those machines are a tribute to the creativity and literature of Jules Verne, the French writer born in Nantes, author of well-known novels like “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Around the world in 80 days”. Indeed, the museum allows children (or adults) to escape from reality throughout imagination, which is crucial when looking for new ideas.
To sum up, I think all the experiences lived during this conference were amazing. Furthermore, I think it is crucial to promote networking especially when you are a young research, not only with people closely related to your research field but also doing outreach and dissemination activities. Personally, a person really masters a subject when he is able to explain it to other people who are not experts in the field. Finally, I would like to thank the Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN-ETN AdMoRe to give us the opportunity of receiving such a good formation.