Last November, the fourth edition of the international SOFA Week took place from the 22nd to the 26th November 2021. Open and free, this SOFA Week is designed to gather the entire SOFA community, to present technological and scientific advances, while fostering the networking within the community.

Due to the Covid pandemic, all events were held online. The event was a success according to the community, proof is the growing number of participants!

International Symposium

Researchers and companies from the SOFA community joined the Symposium in order to present their on-going research or products based on SOFA199 registered participants and 32 international speakers at the Symposium, to share ideas, experiences and build new collaborations! Six different sessions were organized with a total of 19 oral presentations. Close to 200 researchers (+30%) and companies from 32 different countries took part to the Symposium online event.

We are excited to see the resulting collaborations to come!

Award ceremony

The open-source award program was organized to reward the best open source SOFA contributions. Four contributions were competing this year and the quality of these submissions must be stressed out. The winners were announced during the Symposium:

• Prize of the Organization Committee: Jean-Nicolas Brunet for his implementation of the Caribou plugin, a modular and generic approach for FE simulation.
• Public’s prize: Peter Somers for his QSofaGLViewTools project, easing the management of SOFA cameras in python3

Read more about the SOFA Awards on the dedicated article here.

DRIVEN satellite event

For the first time, the SOFA Week 2021 includes a satellite event: a workshop organized by the EU project DRIVEN. The overall aim of the DRIVEN project is to boost the scientific excellence and innovation capacity in data-driven simulation. Three topics are addressed by the different partners:

• Mathematical foundations for data-driven simulations
• Data-driven simulations for computer-assisted therapy
• Data-driven simulations for functional composite materials

STC#12: Technical Committee

The week ended with the SOFA Technical Committee #12. This bi-annual technical committee governs and takes all technical decisions for the roadmap towards upcoming releases.

Open and free, the STC is the occasion for all SOFA developers to meet and discuss the on-going and future developments in SOFA. It is therefore a unique opportunity to get closer from the dev community and code all together during the coding sprint session. A summary of the STC#12 will soon be made available online (see the roadmap page).