NPC9

Meeting Report

The ninth annual meeting of the Nordic Pilot Center was held at Holmen Fjordhotell outside Oslo 20-21 October 2005. The conference site was located just at the shore, with an excellent restaurant facing the breathtaking view over the Oslo fjord, where we had lunch and dinner. The meeting was attended by 27 persons and 23 presentations were made showing ongoing research activities in the Nordic countries. Also information from ERCOFTAC and national reports were given.

At the meeting Helge Andersson (NTNU) and Stefan Wallin (FOI) were nominated to represent the Nordic PC in the ERCOFTAC Managing Board for the next two years. In the beginning of this year Prof. Gustav Amberg was appointed as the dean for the new School of Engineering Sciences at KTH, and, thus, resigned as the coordinator of the Nordic PC. We would like to thank Gustav for his service within the Nordic PC and ERCOFTAC and wish him good luck in his new position. The coordination of the Nordic PC was taken over by Stefan Wallin, KTH.

The future activities of the Nordic PC and the lackof interest for the Nordic PC meeting were discussed. It was decided that the Nordic PC should meet every year and the national representatives together with the PC coordinator should be more active in advertising the meeting. We should continue to focus mainly on the PhD students and their work and also realise that senior professors as well as industrial representatives are important for keeping the high status of the meetings. Also the feedback from the senior persons is important for the students and invited talks could be inspiring and interesting contributions. The location of the meetings should continue to be “remote” in order to stimulate the social interactions between the attendee during the evenings, preferable with some activity. It was pointed out that it is important to keep the cost down so that all PhD students that would like to attend will have that possibility. One idea was to have the meeting on board of one of the cruising ships that are in traffic around the Nordic countries. These typically have fully equipped conference equipments.

At the meeting we were pleased to have a new memberfrom industry, Odegaard & Danneskiold-Samsoe A/S from Denmark, represented by Dr. Johan Gullman-Strand. The national representatives should be active in approaching new member candidates.

By: Stefan Wallin