Mailed on 2 July 2021.

Educational Newsletter

A collaboration between the study programme and W.S.G. Abacus

Edition July 2021

 

This is the last newsletter of this academic year. This is also the last one from me as the programme director. A
new programme director will take over the helm from 1 st September. I had the pleasure to work with many of you directly but with most of you indirectly via different platforms. I am confident that programme will remain in good hands and my successor will take the programme to a new level.
You are probably almost done with your exams. Now it is time to have a well-deserved summer break, recharge your battery and start the new academic year with fresh energy. As things look now, we are going to have an almost normal (on-campus) education/life again.
In this newsletter, some new colleagues will introduce themselves to you. Also, you can read short summary-reports from Module-03, Module-07 and Module-11.

Wishing you all a safe and healthy summer vacation,
Pranab Mandal, Programme Director AM

 

Together with the last newsletter of this academic year, there comes an end to my board year. I tried to pass on
the feedback of the students to the programme and approached the students with the questions of the programme, for example about the drawing tablets. And, of course, I composed the quarterly educational newsletter of which you are now reading the last one under my supervision. Besides the regular content, you can read in this newsletter a short piece about the new specialisation in the Master of AM, the evaluation of the mentor-group meetings and about the Bachelor Conference. The last piece is written by the Candidate Officer Educational Affairs Niels Apeldoorn, who took this year part in the Bachelor Conference himself! Enjoy reading the newsletter and your, probably deserved, holiday!

Anouk Beursgens, Officer Educational Affairs W.S.G. Abacus

                                                                                                                                                                                             

New: AI for Health Specialisation in the Master AM

by Dr.Ir. J. Goseling

Within the new specialisation AI4Health, students will gain a solid foundation in statistics, machine learning and
operations research and learn how to leverage the potential of AI for high-stakes real-world applications in healthcare.
During the two-year-specialisation, offered within the Master’s in Applied Mathematics, you follow several courses
to gain understanding of AI and the mathematics behind it. This theoretical knowledge will be put into practice
in real-world case studies, developed in close collaboration with clinical partners in hospitals. Students can work
on, for example, improving healthcare logistics, developing algorithms to improve the analysis of medical images or
processing data collected by wearable sensors for patients with heart diseases.
The specialisation starts in September 2021.

Evaluation of the mentor-group meetings

In the beginning of June, the bachelor coordinator, Judith Timmer, and Eduardo Hermsen (CELT) evaluated the
mentor-group meetings with groups of first-year and third-year students. Their experience with the mentor meetings
and new ideas for the meetings were discussed. A summary of the meetings can be found on the Canvas page of AM.

 

Bachelor Conference

by Niels Apeldoorn

Tuesday June 29th the semi-annual Applied Mathematics Bachelor’s Conference took place. Here all students who
have written their Bachelor’s thesis in this semester, including me, held a five-minute pitch about what they did in
the past quartile and what their findings are. A wide variety of topics were addressed and there were many interesting
pitches. A jury was present to select the best pitch. This year the pitch by Wout Leemeijer was chosen and therefore
he gets the Brigit Geveling Best Presentation Award. He will be presented with this trophy, of which he can even
choose the colour himself.

Module evaluations

Module 3

During the Academic Year 2020-2021 Module 3 in the Applied Mathematics Bachelor had to do deal with stringent
COVID-19 measures, which meant that all teaching was online. This put a lot of stress on both the students and
the teaching staff in a module that students already consider to be demanding. Compared to last year the staff and
students now had more experience with online teaching and learning, so many things went smoother than last year,
when we had to make last minute efforts to switch, after about one month on campus teaching, to online teaching. On
campus classes, however, are much better and cannot replace online teaching, both in terms of interaction between
students themselves and students and staff and in teaching and learning quality. The past one and a half year
COVID-19 period has clearly shown some of the major limitations of online teaching and puts the big hype regarding
online teaching that occurred during the last few years in a very different perspective. The challenge is now to keep
the good parts of online teaching.
Due to all COVID-19 issues no major changes were made to the module, except that for each module part the
grade was now separately registered and not only the grade for the whole module. Although this initially caused a
lot of work since all Osiris texts, grading policies etc. had to be changed this was a big improvement, both for the
students, who did not have the stress anymore of not passing a module by missing a single grade for a small module
topic, and also reduced the administrative load for the staff. For students who had to miss exams Vector Calculus
and/or Electricity and Magnetism an extra COVID-19 retake was organized.
The average results from the mathematics students in module 3 were considerably worse than those of last years.
For instance for Vector Calculus 57% of AM students has passed, whereas for TN this is 73%, which is more in line
with previous years. One problem, we think, with the current AM Module 3 is that it is split into too many small
topics, many with 1 or 2 EC’s, which in practice often means that students may have to put more work in total,
because there is always a fixed-cost for each course, no matter how small that is. Also, the mathematics content of
this module has over time become limited. It is good that students have to learn how to apply mathematics, e.g. in
solving physics problems, but in the current module the emphasis is too much on this and other non-mathematical
topics.
This has been signaled to the programme board and we have been promised that it will be thoroughly reviewed
in year 2022-23. For the coming year (2021-22), we shall try our best to minimize the impact on the workload.

Jaap van der Vegt, Module-03 coordinator

Module 7

This module is shared with Bachelor Computer Science students making the participants group huge. The module
was 100% online, except exams, due to Covid. Managing a huge group via online activities was a challenge. This year
an extra complication came (and completely unexpectedly) wherein almost half of the first week had to be made
teaching-free, that made the planning/scheduling of the activities very difficult. Especially the ADM part became
very concentrated. Next year we shall resist getting in to this chaos.
Covid has brought a lot of anxiety – not only to the students, but also to the teachers. However, some of
the negative comments made in the central survey and some personal email received by the teachers were very
unpleasant. Receiving personal comments via email such as “You are putting lives to danger . . . (by holding oncampus
activities)”, or “How dare you” do effect the teachers as well. A bit more of appreciation of what we do for
the students in order to make it all possible, despite the situation, would make us also feel better. But again, this is
a huge and mixed group of participants. Hope to avoid this with online teaching.
This year we have introduced random students groups for the project due to practical considerations, and used
buddycheck and team contracts to get groups working together and monitor group dynamics. Random groups was
not well appreciated. We shall consider other methods for group formations, such as match pairs, so 2+2 (that have
formed before). Team contracts and monitoring went fine. The teachers were satisfied with the use of mix of prerecorded material and live lectures/live tutorials/live group sessions. Some students felt otherwise though. We hope
next year things will be held on campus, but if online activities continues, we shall try to improve these formats by,
for example, making the live lectures shorter in span, possibly providing shorter video-materials (for selfstudy) and do more interactive online activities such as quizzes. We shall also re-think the format for the tutorial, if it has to be
online. This year we have used one- to-one sessions. Maybe we shall collect these one-to-one questions and integrate
in a “central” channel.
All in all, we are happy with the module. Most of the students seems so as well from the central survey.

Marc Uetz, Module-07 coordinator

Module 11

This year the educational activities were completely online, as it was last year. Of course, this year the team was
better prepared. Still, it is the feeling of everybody that on-line teaching cannot be a replacement for on-campus
teaching.
This year, there was one new (elective) course – Simultaneous Statistical Inference. The teacher initially had
some difficulty gauging the students, and in particular, to what mathematical details the materials to present. As the
course progressed it went better. Not being able to see the students definitely had an effect. This year’s experience
will help to improve the course next year, including the exam.
Two other electives – Graph Theory and Mathematical Optimization – had new teachers. It seems that the Graph
Theory did very well. The course was selected one of the best Master Courses. The course material were significantly
improved this year, including new set of slides. A survey among the participants halfway through the course worked
out very well and the teachers could adjust the course accordingly. Next year the teachers will try to incorporate
more suitable self study materials and tutorial exercises and think of ways to encourage group-learning-activities.
Mathematical Optimization course already introduced group-learning-activities. It worked out well and will continue
to improve it next year. Lecture notes will be revised.
On the topic of Information literacy, the involved teacher wants to incorporate one or two small exercises to
make it a bit more interactive, in addition to the provided materials. This will depend on whether physical or online
teaching is taking place next year.
The teachers are satisfied with the performance of the students on the exams. All exams in Module 11 were
organized in campus except the Introduction to PDEs. From the experience on the latter, we can conclude that the
online live proctoring can be doable. But it really depends on the number of students.
After I joined the panel meeting with the students, I also organized an online teacher meeting with Mod 11
team. To both groups, I suggested to have a final meeting all together – teachers and students - in future to make
clear feedback process. The teachers can also ask their questions to the students and react faster for their feedback.
The students were positive to this suggestion. Possibly some intermediate feedback-survey from all students midway
through the module. It will be discussed again next year before the module starts.
As a module coordinator, I am aware that the module 11 consists of independent elective courses. However, I
am planning to create such an environment that the students and teachers can communicate easily to give feedback
each other and learn from each other. I will give an attention not to take too much time form both groups. For the
coming academic year, we all would like to have campus activities more.

Tugce Akkaya, Module-11 coordinator

New lecturers

Antonios Antoniadis joined the department as an assistant professor in April. After obtaining
a degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Crete, Greece and an MSc degree in Theoretical
Computer Science at Lund University, Sweden, he moved to the Humboldt University of
Berlin, Germany to pursue his PhD in energy-efficient scheduling algorithms under supervision
of Susanne Albers. Upon graduating in 2012, Antonios spent a year overseas at the University
of Pittsburgh, USA, working as a postdoc with Kirk Pruhs, before moving back to Germany
and joining Kurt Mehlhorn’s Algorithms and Complexity group, at the Max Planck Institute for
Informatics in Saarbrücken, as a postdoc for two and a half years. After another short postdoc
with Heiko Röglin in Bonn, Germany, he returned to Saarbrücken and the Saarland University
to conduct a three-year research project on energy-efficient computation. Just before joining the
UT he spent two semesters as an interim Professor at the University of Cologne.
Antonios’ research interests lie in algorithms and optimization, and in particular in the areas
of energy-efficient algorithms, online and approximation algorithms, computational geometry, as well as learning
Educational Newsletter AM, a collaboration between the study programme and W.S.G. Abacus
m abacus.utwente.nl T +31 6 12936987 B education@abacus.utwente.nl Page 3
augmented algorithms. When he is not working, he likes to spend time cycling, hiking or traveling or enjoying good
espresso and cheese (not simultaneously).

Annika Betken
My name is Annika Betken. I joined the Department of Applied Mathematics as an assistant
professor in the statistics group in March 2021. I studied mathematics at WWU Münster and
the Ruhr-University Bochum, and graduated with a Ph.D. degree from the latter in 2018. So far
the focus of my research lay in time series analysis. With the University of Twente as my new
academic home, I plan to extend my interests into other directions, such as machine learning.
As a balance to my research activities, I enjoy teaching and look very much forward to meeting
students on campus within the next months. When I am not happily doing math (and activities
are not restricted by a pandemic), I like to go bouldering, traveling, and hiking.

 

Cristóbal Guzmán is an Assistant Professor in the Statistics Group within the Applied Mathematics
Department at the University of Twente. Previously, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow
in the Networks Optimization group at Centrum Wiskunde Informatica, Amsterdam, and
as Assistant Professor in Mathematical and Computational Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Chile. His research interests lie at the intersection of large-scale convex
optimization, machine learning and game theory. Currently, his main research interest is in differential
privacy for machine learning. Cristóbal Guzmán received a Mathematical Engineering
degree from Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile in 2010, and a Ph.D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics
Optimization from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia, USA in 2015. His
research has been funded by a FONDECYT Iniciación grant in 2017, the INRIA Associate Teams project in 2020,
and a FONDECYT Regular grant in 2021.
In his free time, Cristóbal enjoys playing board games and playing his bass guitar.

Hanyuan Hang
My name is Hanyuan Hang, and you can call me Hans. I joined the Department of Applied Mathematics
in March 2021. In 2015, I obtained my PhD in Statistics from University of Stuttgart,
Germany. After graduating, I was a Post-doc Researcher at Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.
From 2017 to 2019, I was an assistant professor at Renmin University of China, and from
2019 to 2021, I joined AI Lab, Samsung Research China as a machine learning researcher. My
current core research area lies in ensemble learning (EL) algorithms including random forest,
boosting, and bagging. I use ideas from statistical learning theory to analyze and develop EL
algorithms for machine learning problems such as classification, regression, density estimation,
anomaly detection, and clustering. I am also interested in related areas such as kernel learning
and deep learning algorithms.
Educational Newsletter AM, a collaboration between the study programme and W.S.G. Abacus
m abacus.utwente.nl T +31 6 12936987 B education@abacus.utwente.nl Page 4