Report on 2004 IUTAM General Assembly

This report was submitted by the chair of the U.S. Delegation, Hassan Aref, Dean of Engineering and Reynolds Metals Professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. The full IUTAM report of the General Assembly may be found at http://www.iutam.net/iutam/download/SR_GA-04.pdf.

The International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics General Assembly met twice during the 21st International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Warsaw, Poland, August 15-21, 2004. The U.S. delegation to the IUTAM General Assembly consisted of Ted Belytschko, Carl Herakovich, Wolfgang Knauss, Gary Leal and Hassan Aref (chair). Also present at the meetings were Jan Achenbach (chair of symposium panel for solid mechanics), Ben Freund (treasurer of IUTAM), and Bruno Boley (member at large).

The President, Keith Moffatt (UK), opened the meeting. The minutes of the last GA in Cambridge, UK, were approved without comment.

Report of the Secretary-General Dick van Campen (The Netherlands)
Four deceased members were remembered - Bruno Boley (MAL, USA) gave a memorial for Yu Ku (USA) who passed away in 2002 just short of his 100th birthday.

It was noted that Prof. Salençon (France), member of the Bureau, had been appointed to the Board of the International Centre for Mechanical Sciences (CISM) and that Prof. Pedley (UK), Secretary of the Congress Committee, had been appointed as IUTAM's representative to the European Mechanics Society (Euromech).

The activity of IUTAM in topical symposia and summer schools was recalled:
20 IUTAM Symposia and one Summer School were held in 2002
4 IUTAM symposia and one Summer School were held in 2003
9 IUTAM symposia are being organized for 2004
7 IUTAM symposia are scheduled for 2005

IUTAM has for the first time co-sponsored (in name only) a non-IUTAM event.

The Secretary gave a report on the IUTAM website for which he is responsible. The website was initiated as part of the preparations for ICTAM2000 in Chicago by Prof. J. W. Phillips of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The domain name iutam.org has been moved to the IUTAM secretariat. The website has been almost entirely re-designed and several pages have been added.

The IUTAM publications, mainly proceedings of symposia and congresses, appear to be running smoothly through a contract with Kluwer. This contract was discussed later in the meeting.

Report of the Treasurer, Ben Freund (USA)
IUTAM is in sound financial shape with a balance of about $390,000. The details of the budget were reported.

Annual Dues
Based on discussions in the Bureau, the Treasurer recommended dues for 2005 and 2006 to be set as indicated below. Adhering organizations (mostly academies in various nations) pay 1, 3, 5, 9 and 12 times the following amounts $620 (2001), $649 (2002), $ 649 (2003), $ 663 (2004), $ 676 (2005), $ 690 (2006) in order to have 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 delegates at the General Assembly. OECD statistics are used as a guide for setting dues. The dues increase amounts to about a 2% increase. The proposal was adopted unanimously.

Report by the Secretary of the Congress Committee, Tim Pedley (UK)
The Executive Committee of the Congress Committee (XCCC) met in July 2003 in Tallinn, Estonia, and on Sunday, August 15, in Warsaw, Poland. The Secretary described the main points of these meetings: Paper selection procedure for the Congress; Election of members to the Congress Committee (CC); Election of members of the CC to the XCCC. Of particular interest to a U.S. audience were:

(1) that the rankings of papers by several national pre-selection committees, including the U.S. committee, were greatly at variance with the rankings by the chairs of prenominated sessions (almost all papers are classified into a set of prenominated sessions) and the subsequent rankings of the International Papers Committee (IPC) which has the final say in selection of papers for presentation at the Congress. The sentiment was expressed that the national pre-selection committee mechanism had outlived its relevance and might be abolished for the next congress.

(2) The following were nominated for membership on the CC: H. Aref, also nominated for a second term on the XCCC; L. B. Freund nominated for the XCCC (since he was nominated as incoming President of IUTAM); R. Abeyaratne, N. Aubry, S. Kyriakides, A. Needleman, and H. Stone were nominated for regular membership of the CC; also nominated were K. R. Sreenivasan (currently resident in Italy but a member of US/NAE), and V. Tvergaard (foreign member of NAE).

Matters concerning Adhering Organizations
The Bureau had decided to suspend Morocco for failure to ever pay any dues.

Matters concerning Affiliated Organizations
ICA, the International Congress on Acoustics, has applied directly for ICSU membership, i.e., has applied to become a scientific union. ICA has been affiliated with IUTAM since 1998 and there has been a representative of IUTAM in ICA (the ICA rep to IUTAM is S. Crandall, USA). ICA seeks the support of IUTAM to become a full union member of ICSU. Such an application requires the support of several unions to be successful.

ICA started as subcommittee of IUPAP in 1951; it became an affiliated commission of IUPAP in 1996, and became financially independent of IUPAP at that time. ICA runs triennial congresses, supports 2-4 symposia in acoustics each year, has 43 member acoustical societies paying subscriptions, etc. It is comparable in scale of operation to IUTAM itself.

The President felt that the application idea seems reasonable, however, acoustics is a subfield of mechanics - hence, he argued, it is hard for IUTAM to agree to "dismemberment" of the subject by establishing an international union for acoustics. Also, another organization that deals with acoustics, IIAV, is also affiliated to IUTAM and should at least be consulted. ICA becoming a union set an awkward precedent for IUTAM. Would the International Congress on Fracture, ICF, want to become IUF? The International Congress on Rheology, ICR, become IUR?

IUAc (if formed) would have to seek national adhering organizations at raised levels of subscription; this is not straightforward. IUAc would have to pay annual dues to ICSU.

The GA was asked to ponder the question whether IUTAM should support ICA's application to ICSU. IUPAP is, apparently, prepared to support it. Later in the meeting, the IUTAM president put the issue of whether IUTAM should support this application to a straw vote. The straw vote showed IUTAM GA to be equally divided pro and con. S. Crandall said that this was a satisfactory response for the time being.

Working Parties (WP)
The Bureau has received updated reports from working parties, which were enclosed with the material sent to delegates. WP-8, Geophysical and Environmental Mechanics, is not yet up and running. It was suggested that Paul Linden at UCSD will chair this working party. The Bureau proposes that the chairmanship of WPs rotate every four years.

A presentation and discussion of reports from WPs 1-7 and 9 followed. All WPs have U.S. representation:
WP-1 on Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics and Rheology: L.G. Leal
WP-2 on Dynamical Systems and Mechatronics: M. Tomizuka
WP-3 on Mechanics of Materials: C. T. Herakovich;
WP-4 on Materials Processing: R. M. McMeeking and C. Macosko;
WP-5 on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics: J. T. Oden and T. Belytschko;
WP-6 on Biomechanics: J. E. Bechtold;
WP-7 on Nano- and Micro-Scale Phenomena in Mechanics: Y. Huang;
WP-9 on Education in Mechanics and Capacity Building: H. Aref and K.R. Sreenivasan

Re WP-1 Leal reported on the scheduling conflict between the congresses on rheology and the IUTAM congresses. The other chairs of WPs elaborated on their written reports circulated prior to the meeting.

The GA confirmed P. Linden (USA) as chair of WP-8 and R. McMeeking (USA) as chair of WP-4. Chairs of WPs are encouraged to appoint up to five members. From now on chairs of WPs should serve 4 or maximally 6 years and then chairs should rotate; also there should be a "gentle rotation" of members of WPs.

Report on relations with ICSU
Moffatt reported on his participation on behalf of IUTAM in ICSU meetings. He spoke about the relationship of IUTAM and sister unions in priority areas of ICSU (environment, WP-8, information, and capacity building, WP-9). He mentioned the project-oriented grants program and spoke about the success with the AIMS grant (www.aimsforafrica.org) AIMS = African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. IUTAM was the lead applicant with support of IAU, IUGG, IUPAP, IUPAC and IMU. The proposal also had support of 5 national ICSU members (South Africa, U.K., Netherlands, Brazil, and Egypt) and support of the Third World Academy of Science (TWAS). IUTAM supplemented its proposal of $100k with $20k of its own money ($10k directly from IUTAM, $10k volunteered from the surplus of ICTAM2000). Moffatt explained the details of how the grant was to be spent ($50k for students, $25k for distance education, $25k for a workshop held in April 2004 - H. Aref and J. Salençon were speakers at the workshop representing IUTAM areas, Moffatt and van Campen attended and participated in the capacity building sessions).

The document "Science for the XXI century" by Walter Erdelen of UNESCO was mentioned. Several of the key themes: Complex systems, collective phenomena, materials by design, multi-component devices and machines, etc., are central to IUTAM's interests.

The regional offices of ICSU in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and one yet to be defined in "The Arab World" were mentioned. IUTAM proposes to appoint IUTAM reps for each region to liaise with these regional offices.

Moffatt proposed that IUTAM should introduce a new category of "Associate Membership" for countries in the developing world such as Algeria, Sudan, Botswana, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and others, to allow membership with zero subscription, and non-voting observer status, perhaps limited to a trial period of 8 years (at which time one would hope for graduation to category 1 membership). This membership would be limited to countries that currently send one or two participants to ICTAM in the hope of encouraging broader participation and capacity building within than country. The issue was referred to WP-9 for consideration.

Changes of the Statutes

Statutes wording was changed to conform to a traditional practice of IUTAM. This was supplemented by a change of procedure for the terms of reference for the Electoral Committee. The changes were approved by a show of hands.

Election of members of the Bureau
- Ben Freund (USA) was elected President of IUTAM for the period 2004-2008.
- Juri Engelbrecht (Estonia) was elected Treasurer.
- Dick van Campen (The Netherlands) continues as Secretary.
- Keith Moffatt becomes Vice President by statute.
- Tsutomo Kambe (Japan) was elected unopposed due to Narasimha's withdrawal. (Roddam Narasimha (foreign member of the U.S. NAE and NAS) was nominated for a second term as member of the Bureau of IUTAM. Although the Electoral Committee had contacted candidates prior to the GA, Professor Narasimha decided to withdraw from consideration at the meeting.)
- In two-candidate contests Olhoff (Denmark), Zheng (China), and Kluwick (Austria) were elected to the Bureau.

Election of Members-at-Large
The U.S. community will be particularly interested in the re-election of Bruno Boley and Phil Hodge and the election for the first time of Andy Acrivos as Members-at-large of the IUTAM General Assembly for a renewable four-year period.

IUTAM Symposia and Summer Schools

No fluid mechanics symposia are proposed for the U.S., but two of the highly rated proposals have strong U.S. participation. Thus, "Interactions for dispersed systems in Newtonian and visco-elastic fluids" to be held in Mexico in 2006 has G. M. Homsy (UCSB) as co-chair, and "Recent advances in multiphase flows: Numerical and Experimental" to be held in Turkey in 2007 has A. Acrivos as co-chair.

Three U.S. solid mechanics proposals were rated "B" and "B-".

The issue of assuring that scientists can get visas in a timely manner to attend symposia and summer schools was briefly mentioned.

It was proposed to accept all proposals for symposia ranked "A”. The two symposia with U.S. participation mentioned above were approved.

Next a vote by secret ballot was taken on all proposals rated B (this category includes all 3 USA proposals). No U.S. proposals were accepted for 2006-2007.

There were only two proposals for summer schools, and one was withdrawn; the other proposal was, thus, approved unanimously.

Report on Closure of the Assessment Actions
The Secretary reported that the Bureau has composed a report on the closure on the Assessment Panel recommendations. Bureau requests that report be accepted by GA. This was done by a show of hands.

Publication of Proceedings
Renewal of the contract with publishers was discussed. A series of questions were put to publishers re bids for proceedings. Kluwer and World Scientific responded to the questions. The sense of the discussion was that Kluwer would be asked to continue the contract under the improved terms proposed.

Election of Members of the Congress Committee of IUTAM
The results of vote for CC were that: Stelios Kyriakides, Nadine Aubry, and Viggo Tvergaard were elected. Three women (Aubry, Barthes-Biesel (France) and Goryacheva (Russia)) were elected to the new CC. There are no women members of the current CC.

Election of members of the Symposia Panels
Bureau proposes that the Symposia panels continue for a second term.

Date and venue of the next General Assembly
Ben Freund thanked the Electoral Committee for the opportunity to serve as President, and thanked the GA for their vote of confidence. He invited the next GA to Rhode Island in summer 2006, the dates to be determined.

Other business
L. van Wijngaarden (The Netherlands) asked how the ideas of the WPs were to be translated into actions at the next congress or by IUTAM in general. The Secretary-General responded that he and the Secretary of the CC would remind the WP chairs to suggest minisymposia and special lectures for the next congress. R. Moreau stated that he believes the WPs were to act as a bridge to neighboring communities.

Additional actions
At the meeting of the Congress Committee (following the two GA meetings) it was decided that IUTAM would accept the invitation to hold the 2008 congress in Adelaide, Australia.