Hi
I am Aslak, and I try to do two things: be the leader of Simula and be an active researcher. Here, you can read about my duties as leader of Simula and my research interests.

Management

Simula Research Laboratory is something different; a special kind of enterprise. We are a not a university, and we are not a research institute doing contractual work for industry. Rather, we are a government-funded laboratory constructed in order to do the following:

• perform basic research in the field of ICT
  
• educate graduate students in this field, and
  
• create new businesses based on our competence.
  

My job is to make sure that all activities at Simula are directed towards these three issues. If you are interested in reading more about how we do things at Simula, please consult this document (Norwegian version). More specifically, I see it as my job to:

1. Formulate and implement a clear strategy for Simula Research Laboratory
   
2. Emphasise strong research at an international level, enabling publication in high-quality journals
   
3. Focus our research on carefully selected topics,
   
4. Establish and implement a strategy for creating commercial results based on Simula's research
   
5. Establish and implement a strategy for educating PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers at Simul
6. Initiate and nurture collaboration between Simula and scientific and industrial partners 
7. Maintain and strengthen good relations between Simula's departments and researchers 
8. Establish good administative and computer operating routines, thus enabling researchers to focus as much as possible on scientific efforts 
   
9. Formulate and implement Simula's view on issues arising at Fornebu and ICT-related political issues in Norway 
   
10. Report on the general status of Simula Research Laboratory and initiate strategic initiatives for our Board of Directors
    
11. Report on the status of Simula Research  Laboratory to the Research Council of Norway and to the three governmental ministries that fund Simula
    
12. Recruit leaders for administrative positions and leading scientists for Simula's departments
    

All of these assignments are carried out in close cooperation with employees at Simula, with the Board of Directors and with the Scientific Advisory Board.

Research interests

In my first period as a researcher, I concentrated on nonlinear partial differential equations. More specifically, I tried to understand hyperbolic conservation laws. I also worked on solving linear systems of equations. Later, I became more and more interested in applications. For the last ten years I have tried to understand the Bidomain equations for modelling the electrical activity of the heart. There is a group at Simula working on numerical methods and software for these equations.

Teaching and supervising

I have never been much of a teacher. Nowadays I rarely teach anything at all, but I enjoy writing introductory texts on topics in scientific computing. I also enjoy supervising students, and so far I have been involved in supervising the following Phd students:

Linda Ingebrigtsen, Ola Skavhaug, Joakim Sundnes, Kent Andre Mardal, Are Magnus Bruaset, Jan Olav Langseth, Einar Haug, Bjørn Fredrik Nielsen, Håvard Thevik, Xing Cai, Wen Shen, Glenn Terje Lines, Åsmund Ødegård, Monica Hanslien and Mary MacLachlan.

Editorial work

I have edited two books and I am presently on the editorial board of two scientific journals:

• SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
• Computing and Visualization in Science