A lot happened to PSE for SPEED as well as personally for me (Prof. Rafiqul Gani) during 2023. I am happy that we both survived, and we are ready for 2024 and beyond. 2023 was a very busy and positive year in many respects.

It was great to physically meet many people that we could not meet since March 2020. I was able to again regularly meet, in-person, the excellent TH Team members of PSE for SPEED in 2023. During 2023, we worked on several industrial projects; developed a number of state-of-the-art computational tools (for sustainable process design, chemical substitution, and property prediction, to name a few); organized webinars on topics of wide interest and with good attendance; established contacts with academic institutions for the use of our software tools for educational purposes and many more. Please visit our company website for latest news and developments (www.pseforspeed.com).

On a personal level, it was a year when I met and established contacts with many of my friends and colleagues from academia and industry in Europe, South and North America and Asia. I was lucky to attend special anniversary celebration events of UAM (Mexico), UNC (Colombia) and BUET (Bangladesh). I had the pleasure of giving short 3-5 days intensive graduate level courses on Sustainable Process Design at 7 different universities in South Korea, China, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, where researchers and engineers from industry also attended.

I would like to mention a few special developments from 2023 – research collaboration with Professor Vankat Venkatasubramanian and his former PhD student Dr. Vipul Mann that resulted in publications in the area of process synthesis-design and chemical product synthesis-design in the era AI and ML; a publication on sustainable biorefinery networks resulting from a collaboration with Prof. Suttichai Assabumrungrat and Prof. Nuttha Thongchul; development of PureML (a machine learning based software tool for prediction of 25 pure compound properties with very high accuracy); and, two special workshops on the use of our software tools, one online for Aarti Industries Ltd in India, and another in-person for researchers from academia and industry in Thailand. We are planning more in 2024.

Planet earth is facing a number of challenges, most of which are also created by us humans. We are ready to tackle some of these challenges by our humble means and we are also ready to join forces with anybody interested in a mutually beneficial arrangement.

To all those with whom we had positive interactions in 2023, we acknowledge your help, and we are grateful for your support that has motivated us to continue.

Finally, even though I retired at the end of 2017 from my permanent professor position, I have not yet retired from Chemical Engineering. I am now an adjunct distinguished professor at HKUST (Guangzhou, China), a research professor at Szhechneyi Istvan University (Gyor, Hungary), and starting from March 2024, I will be an honorary professor at ECUST (Shanghai, China).

The two photos below show us during our online workshop in December 2023 and from the in-person workshop in Bangkok in October 2023.