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Prof. Chen receives NSF BRITE Fellow Award

Congratulations to Prof. Chen for receiving the NSF Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) fellow award. This award was given for the project under the title AI-Enabled Discovery and Design of Programmable Material Systems. The overall vision of the project is to develop methods to design the materials, architectures, and stimuli of programmable material systems simultaneously and predictably. Programmable materials are very promising for use in medicine, transportation, construction, and other areas as they take on new shapes or functions in response to their environments.

More details regarding the NSF Brite award and the project can be found at: NSF BRITE Fellows to investigate high-risk engineering opportunities for impact

IDEAL Attends IDETC 2022 & IDEAL Dinner

We attended the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) 2022 in St. Louis Union Station Hotel, St. Louis, Missouri. The conference was held between August 14-17, 2022. In total, IDEAL members presented 4 papers which are shown below. In addition to reciving the “Paper of Distinction” recognition, Doksoo’s paper also recieved the “DAC Best Paper” award.

Prof. Chen organized a Special Session under the topic “A Dialog on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Scholarly Publications” which aimed to promote the ethical practices for publishing that support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the full community of journal stakeholders, such as authors, reviewers, associate editors, editors, and publisher.

We also had an “IDEAL Dinner” where current IDEAL members, IDEAL alumni and their associates gathered together to celebrate IDEAL, relive favorite IDEAL memories, network and have a good time!


IDETC 2022 Papers
  • Doksoo Lee, Wei (Wayne) Chen, Yu-Chin Chan, Liwei Wang, Wei Chen. “t-METASET: Task-Aware Generation of Metamaterial Datasets by Diversity-Based Active Learning” (IDETC2022-87653).
  • Wei (Wayne) Chen, Doksoo Lee, Oluwaseyi Balogun Wei Chen. “Hierarchical Deep Generative Models for Design Under Free-Form Geometric Uncertainty” (IDETC2022-89707).
  • Akshay Iyer, Suraj Yerramilli, James Rondinelli, Daniel Apley, Wei Chen. “Descriptor Aided Bayesian Optimization for Mixed Variable Materials Design With High Dimensional Qualitative Variables” (IDETC2022-90177).
  • Liwei Wang, Siyu Tao, Ping Zhu, Wei Chen. “Data-Driven Topology Optimization With Multiclass Microstructures Using Latent Variable Gaussian Process”.

Dr. Chen & Dr. Ahmed Receives Honorable Mention from JMD

Dr. Wei (Wayne) Chen’s, currently a Postdoc at IDEAL, and Dr. Faez Ahmed’s, IDEAL Alumni 2019, work under the name “PaDGAN: Learning to Generate High-Quality Novel Designs”, has been chosen to receive an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Journal of Mechanical Design Editors’ Choice Award in the category of Design Methods. Congratulations to both!

Dr. Sha Receives 2022 ASME CIE Young Engineer Award

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Zhenghui Sha, IDEAL Alumni, has recently earned the 2022 ASME CIE Young Engineer Award. Dr. Sha was a member of IDEAL in 2016 as a Postdoc (advised by Dr. Wei Chen) and is now an Assistant Professor at University of Texas at Austin. The award recognizes his outstanding contributions and applications in the Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE) field. Congratulations Dr. Sha!

Dr. Hongyi Xu Recieves NSF Early Career Award

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Hongyi Xu, IDEAL Alumni, has recently earned the NSF Early Faculty award. Dr. Xu received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2014 (advised by Dr. Wei Chen) and is now an assistant professor at University of Connecticut. The award was given for his work on Bridging the Gap between Deterministic and Stochastic Structures for Mixed Stochasticity System Design. The overarching research goal of this project is to create a novel computational framework that bridges the gap between deterministic and stochastic structures by establishing a unified design space that covers structural patterns whose stochasticity ranges from random to regular. More information about his award are available at: University Faculty Selected for NSF Early Career Award

Yu-Chin Defends her Ph.D. Dissertation

Our lab member Yu-Chin Chan successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis on June 6th under the title Data-Driven and Diversity Enhanced Design of Heterogenous Multiscale Structures. Congratulations, Yu-Chin! Yu-Chin will continue her career at Siemens. We wish her the best and good luck in her future endeavors!

Liwei’s Paper Featured at PNAS

Congratulations to Liwei Wang, whose paper “Mechanical cloak via data-driven aperiodic metamaterial design” has been published in the latest issue (Vol 112., No.13) of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The significance of his work is as follows: While cloaks have been manufactured for optical, thermal, and electric fields, limited progress has been made for mechanical cloaks. Most existing designs rely on mapping-based methods, which have so far been limited to special base cells and a narrow selection of voids with simple shapes. Liwei et. al developed a fundamentally different approach by exploiting data-driven designs to offer timely, customized solutions to mechanical cloaking that were previously difficult to obtain. Through simulations and experimental validations, they show that excellent cloaking performance can be achieved for various boundary conditions, shapes of voids, base cells, and even multiple voids.

Prof. Chen Recieves 2022 Engineering Science Medal

Congratulations to Professor Chen for receiving the 2022 Engineering Science Medal. This award is given by the Society of Engineering Sciences each year for important contributions to engineering science. Professor Chen received the Medal for her groundbreaking contributions to design under uncertainty, in particular for establishing formalism and developing robust design methods to accelerate the use of physics-based simulations in design.

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