As President Emeritus, CEO & Treasurer I am delighted to add my own welcome to this ICF13 website to those of the ICF President, Professor Alberto Carpinteri and of the ICF13 Executive Chairman, Professor Yu Shou-Wen. Due to circumstances beyond our control a change in the date of ICF13 has been necessary. The new dates are June 16-21 2013 at the original venue in Beijing, China at the Olympic Village. We trust that this change will not inconvenience our delegates to what promises to be an outstanding benchmark quadrennial conference in our series since 1965.
In fact we can now announce that the ICF-WASI Gold Medal Opening Honour Lecture will be delivered by Professor Subra Suresh, NSF Director, Washington USA, arguably the top world scientist. With the ICF Honour Presidential Lecture by Professor Alberto Carpinteri and the ICF Honour Closing Lecture by Professor Yiu-Wing Mai. Biographies and details of these Star Lectures are provided separately. It can be seen that with this highest possible standard of the three Honour Lectures as well as a line-up of the leading global authorities for our Plenary and Keynote Lectures that we are all destined to experience a best-ever ICF-WASI quadrennial in China next year.
ICF: The World Academy of Structural Integrity sends the very warmest greetings & welcome to our global community of scientists and technologists, engineers and others working in the wide-ranging field of structural integrity looking forward to seeing you all in June 2013 in the great city of Beijing, China.
ICF was founded in 1969 at ICF2 in Brighton, England, by Professor Takeo Yokobori with origins at ICF1 in Sendai, Japan in 1965 and earlier at the precursor ICF0 in Swampscott, USA in 1959 organised by MIT. The International Congress on Fracture is today the premier international body for the promotion of industrial, experimental & theoretical research, education and worldwide cooperation among scientists and engineers concerned with the mechanics and mechanisms of fracture, fatigue and structural integrity. On this website we shall include the full Statutes & Bye-Laws together with the important documents related to the range of Awards via the work of the Awards Chairman Professor Ashok Saxena which significantly enrich our Academy as well as a paper outlining the History of ICF and other relevant documentation on the democratic processes of our World Academy. Including details of the Council and Executive Committee meetings arranged at ICF13. I welcome you to visit those sections of the website as these are developed.
The challenges of increasingly complex systems and structures has made an extensive “Structural Integrity” approach more and more evident and essential. So over the decades since 1965, ICF has provided an international forum for fostering and highlighting individual, industrial and national accomplishments in a wide range of disciplines including many which are beyond the traditional arenas – from nano to mega scales, from the physical to the holistic and systems modeling.
We aim to concentrate on the demands of the future to find solutions for greater safety, reliability, durability and functionality of materials, components and systems. This can only be accomplished in interdisciplinary cooperation of basic research and industrial application, scientists and engineers united in this aim and challenging task. This involves diversity in scientific, technical, educational, social as well as historical aspects, creating thereby unique synergistic effects for the global common good. This new “Academy” has more than 40 years experience as a community with a global reach in over 50 countries, ever expanding.
All documents, Minutes, Reports, Blogs are openly available as well as most importantly all the Proceedings and Research Papers from 1965 onwards, especially on our archival section of the new ICF-WASI website under development (www.ICF-WASI.org) by Professor Francesco Iacoviello of IGF & Frau Susanne Bachofer of DVM with a formal website launch in Turin by Professor Alberto Carpinteri in October 2012, and via the Quadrennial and Interquadrennial websites. We welcome comprehensive dialogue and creative input from all members of the structural integrity and fracture mechanics community through the ICF-WASI website. Much planning work has been in process since the seminal ExCo meetings in Dresden (September 2010), Anaheim (May 2011) & Sendai (October 2011) during this springboard quadrennium of Professor Alberto Carpinteri. The website for ICF14, May 7-12 2017 in Rhodes Greece, as a Pan-European ICF-WASI quadrennial in close collaboration with England and Germany in the Technical and Industrial Programmes, will be launched by Professor Emmanuel Gdoutos ICF14 Executive Chairman in June 2012. The plans for ICF15 in July 2021 are also well-developed and I anticipate that this will be a Pan-American ICF-WASI quadrennial in Vancouver, Canada with close collaboration with a wide range of organisations in USA, Canada and the Americas. We also have instituted a new programme of ICF-WASI Interquadrennials via Professor Mimoun Elboujdaini with a special ICF IQ in Luxor, Egypt, November 2011 at an historic time in Africa.
This has been a most exciting and adventurous period of development since ICF12 in Ottawa in June 2009 and your Academy is in a very healthy state ready for the next quadrennium under the leadership of Professor Yu Shou-Wen as the Thirteenth ICF-WASI President 2013-2017.
David Taplin
April 27 2012
