The lesson I learnt from that project was that there is no help in having a clever model for an industrial process, when there is (a) no chance to get the model parameters for this process and (b) the parameters in fact are essential for the results.
In the ski production project, (a) and (b) were the case so that we had to stop the project.
The Industrial Mathematics Institute, which is my scientific cradle, so to say, is certainly one of the leading centers in the world for inverse problems (with the big names Engl, Neubauer, Scherzer, Kaltenbacher and several more somehow related to the foundations of nonlineat inverse problems theory), and this is one of the reasons why we at UnRisk are especially proud of our calibration routines.
The Figures show calibration results for curve fitting without regularization and with proper regularization.
A remark: Of course, Austria is not only famous for skiing and calibration but also for percussionists, steel mills, machinery for injection moulding, firefighter cars, bodybuilders. Just to name a few.
