ESR10 - Tobias Metzlaff

After two busy months with a talk at the french Computeralgebra days and a publication with Evelyne Hubert and Cordian Riener, the month of April promises to bring new projects. At Inria, we are happy to welcome Arne Lien and Sebastian Debus , who will spend their secondments here during the coming weeks. As the recent workshop in Tilburg could only take place virtually, it is good to meet other students from the POEMA project again in person. This gives the opportunity to discuss new problems and we are planning for a presentation of interesting results in the near future.

 Last month, Sebastian Debus from UiT Tromso spent the first month of his secondment at INRIA Mediterranee. The secondment is supervised by Evelyne Hubert . It was very interesting to learn about Sebastian's research and we had the chance to work on a trasnfer to multiplicative invariants. Early examples look promising. In February, there are two events. The fourth POEMA workshop will take place this week. The last day of the conference is organised by the POEMA ESRs and we will not only hear three interesting talks on polynomial optimization with an algebraic, numerical and optimization background, but also learn about the application process for Marie Cury postdocs. The french computer algebra days JNCF will take place at the end of February/beginning of march at Luminy, Marseille.

 With POEMA, we do not only conduct academic research, but also get to know the industrial partners. For the last weeks, I worked with NAG during a secondment and could experience the differences between academics and industry. This is a great opportunity for PhD students. The POEMA Industrial Workshop takes place next week at INRIA and NAG will present partial results of this secondment. I am also going to give a talk on Friday and look forward to see the other ESRs.

 The last two months were quite eventful in terms of academic events and exchange: At the second POEMA Learning Week in Toulouse, the ESRs of POEMA could finally meet again in person after one and a half year since the first workshop in Florence. This large gap showed, how much the ESRs have grown and developed in their work. Luckily, I could also meet with Philippe Moustrou , who is now at Bordeaux, to discuss about our joint work. After this learning week, we prepared for a CIRM conference on root systems in modern analysis . This conference took place last week at Luminy, Marseille and my supervisor Evelyne Hubert and I each gave a talk. The slides can be found here .

The workshop  in Cetraro, Italy on algebraic combinatorics of symmetry groups and Coxeter groups was very beneficial for us. My PhD advisor Evelyne Hubert and I met many interesting people and had the possibility to discuss with them in person. A feature, that was missing in virtual conferences. So it comes, that I am even more looking forward to the upcoming POEMA conference in Toulouse next month. Hopefully many members of the network will be able to travel to France and back. Preparations for the secondment with NAG are advancing and I should move to Oxford for three months, starting in October. From this stay abroad, I hope to gain insights into the work of the industrial partners, accompanied by solutions or approaches to solutions for current problems in polynomial optimization.

This summer offers several conferences. With MEGA and GO60 already past, I am looking forward to next weeks workshop on algebraic combinatorics of the symmetric groups and coxeter groups. For us, this is the first event since the pandamic, which will not be held virtually. My supervisor Evelyne Hubert and I will have a week of fruitful discussions in Cetraro, Italy. Afterwards, ISSAC 2021 is advancing and we prepare a talk at the Aromath Seminar in the same week. The crowning end of this series of conferences will be the SIAM conference AG21 in August, for which registration is now open.

For the Aromath Seminar in May we have the pleasure of listening to two postdocs: Philippe Moustrou and Navid Nemati . Navid worked at Inria for the duration of last year and it was always great to discuss with him about math and scientific research in general over an occasional coffee. The first time I met Philippe was at the POEMA workshop in Florence and then later during my secondment in Tromso. I'm looking forward to both talks. The next big events will be the MEGA conference in early June and later the second POEMA Learning Week .