Minutes of the first preparatory meeting of ACCMS

Minutes of the first preparatory meeting of ACCMS held at Sendai International Center during the International Workshop on "Materials Designs by Computer Simulation at Atom and Electron Levels" (18th & 19th August, 2000)

The meeting is attended by 16 scientists from Japan, India, China and other countries (list appended below). The salient feature of the discussion that took place and the decisions that followed are summarized as follows.

1. Y. Kawazoe from IMR, Japan formally proposes the formation of an Asian Consortium on Computational Materials Science (ACCMS) and invites suggestions and opinions of the scientists from different countries present in the meeting.
2. G.P. Das (BARC, India) explained the objectives of this consortium and also about its organization and membership. ACCMS will be opened to all interested institutions of the Asian member countries. Affiliated membership of institutions outside this region (other countries) will also be taken. Until the membership of the consortium is formalized, an interim advisory council (one from each member country at the moment) is appointed to suggest and nominate suitable members from their respective countries. In order to carry out the objectives of this consortium, an interim executive committee consisting of Y. Kawazoe, G.P. Das and B.L.Gu has been formed. This 3-member committee will be responsible for carrying out the activities of the consortium which includes formation of a web page, membership drive in different Asian countries, etc., deciding the venue and timings of ACCMS forthcoming meetings, etc.
3. M. Doyama (Teikyo Univ., Japan) supported the idea and appropriate launching time of this consortium and suggested the possible ways of mobilizing funds for running the activities of the consortium.
4. P. Jena (Virginia Commonwealth Univ., USA) spoke about the recent proposed formation of PACT (Pan American Consortium of Theorists) which is in the same spirit as ACCMS, and aim at strengthening the scientific collaboration between North and South American countries. He also emphasized that the sustainablility and growth of such a consortium crucially depends on each and every member country and member institute accruing benefit from it.
5. S. Ranganathan (IISC, India) strongly advocated and appreciated formation of this consortium during the ISRE 2000 Meeting in Sendai, which itself is an effort towards bringing together scientists of Asian (and also other) countries for promoting Research and Education in this region. He, however, emphasized the need of establishing a strong link between the computational materials scientists and the experimentalists working in this field. A synergy between theory and experiment should be the motivation behind this consortium. Similar view were also expressed by. B.K. Godwal, P. Jena, R. Belosludov and others.
6. John Meech (Univ. of British Columbia, Canada) along with many others suggested that this consortium should encourage a strong link between computational materials scientists and materials technologists. This will ensure that the results of computer simulations find more and more practical applications in different technological usage. The predictive power of first principles simulations should be exploited to its fullest potential.
7. Luc Wille (Florida Atlantic Univ., USA) stressed that the scope of this consortium should not be restricted to only first-principles atomistic level simulation of materials, but should be diversified to include the course grained as well as continuum models of simulations in meso- and macroscopic length scales.
8. V. Kumar (IMR, Japan) highlighted the need for educating students from different Asian countries on the emerging areas of CMS and also to promote remote education through Internet. This will especially benefit students from developing countries who do not have enough computational and other resources. Y. Kawazoe added that we should also try to evaluate students performance and distribute certificates in some form.
9. K. Esfarjani suggested that each meeting of ACCMS should be focussed on a specific topic which is of relevance and interest to a majority of the group attending it. This point was debated by some others who expressed some reservation, since such further narrowing down the scope of a meeting may not serve the interest of all the members institutions. Instead, it should be possible to identify for each meeting, a "theme" area and devote one of the days of the meeting on it for in-depth coverage.
10. B.L. Gu (Tsinghua Univ., China) later joined the discussion meeting and was briefed about the developments by J.-Z. Yu. Subsequently, B.L. Gu, Y. Kawazoe and S. Ranganathan had some discussions about the choice of the venue for the first Meeting of ACCMS in the year 2001, and they arrived at the unanimous choice of Bangalore in India. The duration, time and other modalities will be worked out.
11. A write-up of the proposal based on the above mentioned points, was prepared by Y. Kawazoe and G.P.Das, in consultation with others present in the meeting. A 4-page write up was circulated among persons attending this meeting (see below). Also it was decided to put up the proposal along with the minutes of this preparatory meeting in a new ACCMS web-page which will be created by Y. Kawazoe and his group.

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