Graduate Student Heechang Kim Wins Student Paper Prize at EASIAM 2026

Heechang Kim, a graduate student advised by Professor Minseok Choi of the POSTECH Department of Mathematics, won second place in the Student Paper Prize at the 19th East Asia Section of SIAM Annual Meeting (EASIAM 2026), held in Jeju from August 23 to 27, 2026.

The EASIAM Student Paper Prize is a program designed to recognize and encourage outstanding research achievements in applied mathematics and scientific computing by student researchers across East and Southeast Asia. Based on the academic excellence of the paper, its research content, and the student's contribution, an initial review selects five finalists, who present their work at the conference. The final ranking is then determined through a review that includes the presentation and the question-and-answer session. More than 25 papers were submitted to EASIAM 2026 amid keen competition, and Kim was selected as one of the five finalists before being named the second-place winner following his on-site presentation.

The award-winning paper, "CEENs: Causality-enforced evolutional networks for solving time-dependent partial differential equations," addresses numerical methods for time-dependent partial differential equations using scientific machine learning and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). Conventional PINNs learn the initial condition and the governing equations at later times simultaneously, which may violate temporal causality during training and reduce accuracy in long-time simulations. The proposed CEENs overcome this limitation by dividing the time domain into subintervals, assigning a neural network to each, and training them sequentially from the initial condition. Numerical experiments confirmed that CEENs substantially improve long-time accuracy while reducing computational cost and memory usage compared with conventional methods.

"I am very pleased and deeply honored that this award recognizes not only the quality of our research but also my presentation at the conference," Kim said. He added his heartfelt thanks to Professor Minseok Choi for his thoughtful guidance throughout every stage of the work, and to his senior colleagues Jeahan Jung and Hyomin Shin for their valuable collaboration and support.

The award reflects international recognition of Kim's research achievements and presentation skills, and stands as a meaningful demonstration of the POSTECH Department of Mathematics' research competitiveness in applied mathematics and scientific machine learning.