Plenary lectures will be complemented by Invited Sessions organized by recognised experts in targeted research areas. Contributions to these sessions are by invitation of the organizers.

Persons willing to organize an Invited Session on a specific topic are kindly requested to send their proposal to the conference secretariat.

The preliminary list of confirmed Invited Sessions follows:

Advances in the Discrete Element Method (DEM ) for Cohesive Materials
Miguel Angel Celigueta and Eugenio Oñate

Advanced Particle Methods for Continuum Mechanics
Seiichi Koshizuka, Seiya Hagihara and Mitsuteru Asai

DEM models of soils: from clays to rockfill
Marcos Arroyo and Matteo Ciantia

Discrete modeling in cell and tissue mechanobiology
José Manuel García-Aznar, Paul Van Liedekerke, and Andreas Deutsch

Engineering Applications with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics
Alejandro Crespo and José Domínguez Alonso

Fracture and Fragmentation with DEM
Ferenc Kun and Falk Wittel

Granular Plasticity
François Nicot, Antoine Wautier and Felix Darve

The Material Point Method – Recent Advances
Zhen Chen and Xiong Zhang

Micro-Macro: From Particles to Continuum
Stefan Luding

New advances on SPH method: Algorithms and Applications
Xiangyu Hu

Opportunities through DEM-CFD coupling
Bernhard Peters

Parallel Algorithms for Particle Systems
Uli Ruede and Sebastian Eibl

Particle-Based Methods for the Simulation of Natural Hazards
Alessandro Franci, Massimiliano Cremonesi and Antonia Larese

Particle Methods in Agricultural Processes
Guillermo Casas and Miguel Angel Celigueta

Particle shape in the Discrete Element Method
Stefanos Papanicolopulos, Stefano Utili and Kevin Hanley

Vortex Particle Method in Fluid Dynamics
Nikolai Kornev and Galina Dynnikova