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IDEAL Attends IDETC 2025

IDEAL members and alumni attended the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) 2025 in Anaheim, CA. Congratulations to all of the awardees!

IDETC-CIE Awards

  • Faez Ahmed, DAC Young Investigator Award
  • Faez and students (MIT), DAC best paper award, “CAD-Coder: An Open-Source Vision-Language Model for Computer-Aided Design Code Generation,” Anna Doris, Md Ferdous Alam, Amin Heyrani Nobari, Faez Ahmed
  • Shikui Chen and student (Ran Zhuang, SUNY Stony Brook), MR compliant mechanism best paper award, “Level-Set Nonlinear Topology Optimization for Large-Deformation Compliant Mechanisms with Hyperelastic Materials”
  • Zihan Wang (Northwestern, formerly Hongyi’s PhD student), DAC Outstanding Dissertation Award, Rising Stars in Mechanical Engineering Workshop at MIT, Oct. 2025
  • Wei Chen, ASME Barnett-Uzgiris Product Safety Design Award
  • Zhenghui and student (Xingang Li, AP at U of Melbourne), CIE AI/ML best paper award, “Image2CADSeq: Computer-Aided Design Sequence and Knowledge Inference from Product Images”
  • Hongyi Xu and student (Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, UConn), Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle conference (DFMLC) best paper award, “Multimodal Rag-Driven Anomaly Detection and Classification in Laser Powder Bed Fusion Using Large Language Models,” Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, Zhiling Chen, Lela Romeo, Qian Yang, Rajiv Malhotra, Farhad Imani, Hongyi Xu 
  • Ferdous Alam (Faez’s Postdoc) co-authored a paper, which won the ASME SEIKM 2025 Best Paper Award

DAC Papers of Distinction

  • DETC2025-168726 (DAC-01): “Multi-Generation Control Co-Design for Digital Twin-Enabled Systems With Deep Reinforcement Learning,” Ying-Kuan Tsai, Vispi Karkaria, Yi-Ping Chen, Wei Chen 
  • DETC2025-166767 (DAC-03): “Gencad-3d: Cad Program Generation Using Multimodal Latent Space Alignment and Synthetic Dataset Balancing,” Nomi Yu, Md Ferdous Alam, A. John Hart, Faez Ahmed 
  • DETC2025-168619 (DAC-03): “Heterogeneous Metamaterials Design via Multiscale Neural Implicit Representation,” Hongrui Chen, Liwei Wang, Levent Burak Kara 
  • DETC2025-169758 (DAC-04): “CAD-Coder: An Open-Source Vision-Language Model for Computer-Aided Design Code Generation,” Anna Doris, Md Ferdous Alam, Amin Heyrani Nobari, Faez Ahmed 
  • DETC2025-168615 (DAC-06): “Multimodal Rag-Driven Anomaly Detection and Classification in Laser Powder Bed Fusion Using Large Language Models,” Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, Zhiling Chen, Lela Romeo, Qian Yang, Rajiv Malhotra, Farhad Imani, Hongyi Xu 
  • DETC2025-168723 (DAC-10): “Localized Physics-Informed Gaussian Processes With Curriculum Training for Topology Optimization,” Amin Yousefpour, Shirin Hosseinmardi, Xiangyu Sun, Ramin Bostanabad 
  • DETC2025-169141 (DAC-20): “Seek: Self-Adaptive Explainable Kernel for Nonstationary Gaussian Processes,” Nima Negarandeh, Carlos Mora, Ramin Bostanabad 

Student Achievements

  • Eric Seng graduated with the Highest Distinction for his Undergraduate Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University, with his thesis work on Flow Battery Design in collaboration with Anton van Beek
  • Ferdous Alam starting as a TT faculty member at Georgia Tech’s Mechanical Engineering department
  • Yinshuang Xiao started her academic career at Colorado State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering
  • Xingang Li started his academic career at the University of Melbourne as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering
  • Yi-Ping Chen and Gourav Kumbhojkar won the 1st place in CIE Student Hackathon (nTop problem) and 1st place in the Hackathon Meme Award
  • Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah and Hoang Anh Nguyen (Hongyi’s students) won the 1st place in the CIE student Hackathon (Autodesk Problem) and 2nd place in the Hackathon Meme Award

Outstanding Paper Award at NAMRC

The paper titled “Real-time decision-making for digital twin in additive manufacturing with model predictive control using time-series deep neural networks” is selected for the Outstanding Paper Award in Manufacturing Systems out of 270 submissions. Check out our paper here.

Yi-Ping Receives Mentorship Award

Nominated by Professor Wei Chen, Yi-Ping is awarded the Mentorship Award by the Department. The M.E. Department recognizes his effort in mentoring prospective Ph.D. students for their doctoral study applications, mentorship on junior graduate students and undergraduate students, and dedication in helping incoming Ph.D. students for smooth transitions.

Henry Defends his Ph.D. Dissertation

Our lab member Henry Zhang successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on June 3rd under the title Data-Centric Design of Combinatorial Materials Systems. Congratulations Henry! We wish him the best and good luck in his future endeavors!

Yi-Ping and Vispi Receive Martin Fellowship

Yi-Ping Chen and Vispi Karkaria are selected as two of the four recipients of the Martin Outstanding Doctoral Fellowship. The Martin Fellowship recognizes mid-career Ph.D. candidates for their outstanding scholarly and research achievements in mechanical engineering and encourage these young researchers to establish themselves as future leaders in their respective fields. Fellowship selections were made by the ME Faculty Committee of Graduate Studies.

Henry Wins MRS Award

Henry Zhang was selected as a Silver Winner of the Graduate Student Award at the 2025 Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting.

MRS Graduate Student Awards are intended to honor and encourage graduate students whose academic achievements and current materials research display a high level of excellence and distinction. MRS seeks to recognize students of exceptional ability who show promise for significant future achievement in materials research.

IDEAL Attends IDETC 2024

IDEAL members and alumni attended the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) 2024 in Washington, DC, and collected several awards. Congratulations to all of the awardees!

  • Harrison Kim (UIUC), Design Automation Award
  • Hongyi Xu (U of Conn), DAC Young Investigator Award
  • Faez Ahmed (MIT), DTM Young Investigator Award
  • Liwei Wang (CMU), the DAC Dissertation Award
  • Anton Von Beek (UCD, Ireland), DAC Best Paper Award
  • Christopher Luey, Undergraduate Student Design Essay Competition Award
  • Vispi Karkaria, Graduate Student Research Design Essay Competition Award

Prof. Chen Elected to The Academy

Congratulations to Prof. Chen for being elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. The Academy celebrates the importance of knowledge and the belief that the arts and sciences are vital to a free, independent, and virtuous society. We are proud of Prof. Chen’s achievements and her contributions to the field of engineering design.

More details can be found at: Three McCormick Faculty Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Vispi Receives Best Presentation Award at NAMRC

Vispi Neville Karkaria receives the first prize Presentation Award at the annual North American Manufacturing Research Conference (NAMRC) 2024 for his paper titled, “Towards a Digital Twin Framework in Additive Manufacturing: Machine Learning and Bayesian Optimization for Time Series Process Optimization” (Karkaria, V., Goeckner, A., Zha, R., Chen, J., Zhang, J., Zhu, Q., Cao, J., Gao, R.X. and Chen, W.). This research advances Additive Manufacturing Process by integrating real-time monitoring, machine learning, and process optimization within a Digital Twin framework. Nine first-authored students were invited to compete for the prize based on the reviews of 300+ papers received by the conference. Vispi Karkaria was selected as the winner based on the competition of oral presentations, judged based on clarity, originality, and scientific merit by a panel from the NAMRI/SME Honors Committee.

Yigitcan Defends his Ph.D. Dissertation

Our lab member Yigitcan (Yido) Comlek successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on April 26th under the title Interpretable Design of Microstructural Material Systems with Mixed-Variable Representations. Congratulations, Yigitcan! We wish him the best and good luck in his future endeavors!