The preliminary program can be seen here.

The scientific program will consist of the traditional student lectures, poster sessions, workshops and talks from our guest speakers. The list of potential guest speakers can be found here. We intend to use our external relations with IUPAP to invite even more professors which we do not currently know personally.

We are working on several additional formats:

Panel Discussions

Speakers can be grouped together to take part in panel discussions (see a very good example here: [1]). Experts of one field can sit together and talk about the new active problems in their fields.

The topics can be meta-physical as well. Monika Hanauska dedicates important time of her career trying to solve problems in scientific communication. This is an active problem which one comes across at any conference/workshop. Scientists nowadays need a common ground to exchange ideas and discuss new perspectives. A panel discussion about this topic would be very interesting.

We have confirmed interest from Sylwia Kondej and Anamaria Font. We are waiting for Lisa Randall and Alessandra Buonanno to confirm theirs. These are very successful scientists within their own field. We think it would be very interesting for our participants to listen to them in a panel discussion about their paths to success as female scientists.

Dato Gabelaia studies topological semantics of modal logic. Apart from this, he is very much into the combination of philosophy and science. We want to offer him to sit down with, say, string theorists and cosmologists and discuss the "logic of the universe".

Hands-on Seminars

One of our most notable ideas for such a workshop is the participation of GeoAstro [2] - a group of Georgian enthusiasts, who take astrophotography to the next level (if you want to be impressed, take a look at this [3]). They have agreed to help organize an astrophotography workshop, where they will share their experience in taking and editing photos of celestial objects.

The Bank of Georgia (see below in the section of potential sponsors) has just recently started educational campaign for data science. They hold schools and competitions where they teach new methods in Python. We want to invite them for a masterclass in handling "big data".

Lavender plants in Kakheti
Lavender plants in Kakheti, Nukriani. [Copyright: Dimitri Goderdzishvili [2].]

Student Tutorials

We want to offer the students a chance to share their profound knowledge as well. Student presentations are commonly split in about 10 parallel sessions. We want to dedicate 11th room to tutorials given by students. As opposed to presentations, tutorials can be up to 45-60 minutes, depending on the topic. Students will also be allowed to form teams (of 2 or 3) for better performance.

Have you spent the previous years learning about cool tricks with numerical methods? Do you want to give an introduction to deep learning and teach your peers how to get started? You can submit the contents of your tutorial and our scientific program team will review it. Depending on the number of submissions, we might even agree on having two parallel tutorial sessions.

References