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!
Blog
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!
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
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!
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.
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.
Read the full news on McCormick’s website:
Liwei and Akshay’s paper on “Data-Driven Design via Scalable Gaussian Processes for Multi-Response Big Data with Qualitative Factors” received the Paper of Distinction recognition at the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) 2021 . The conference was held virtually between August 17 – 19, 2021. Also, this paper is now published in the Special Issue of AI for Engineering Design in the Journal of Mechanical Design. Congratulations to Liwei and Akshay!
Also, IDEAL attended this year’s IDETC with 3 papers. Congratulations to our lab members! All of the papers can be found below.
IDETC 2021 Papers
- Liwei Wang, Suraj Yeraramilli, Akshay Iyer, Danial Apley, Ping Zhu, Wei Chen. “Data-Driven Design via Scalable Gaussian Processes for Multi-Response Big Data With Qualitative Factors” (IDETC2021-71570).
- Umar Farooq Ghumman, Anton Van Beek, Joydeep Munshi, TeYu Chien, Ganesh Balasubramamian, Wei Chen. “SDF-Based Inverse Process Design of Solar Cells Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations” (IDETC2021-71595).
- Faez Ahmed, Yaxin Cui Yan Fu, Wei Chen. “A Graph Neural Network Approach for Product Relationship Prediction” (IDETC2021-69462).
Prof. Chen attended the 16th annual National Congress on Computational Mechanics (USCCM) as a Conference Plenary speaker on July 26, 2021 under the title “Data-Driven Design of Engineered Materials Systems: Challenges and Opportunities”. The talk can be viewed on youtube.
IDEAL was honored to invite alumni for the Summer 2021 Virtual Group Meetings. Each alumni discussed and gave valuable information on their respective research areas. The alumni who attended the meetings can be found below.
It was a great pleasure to have our distinguished alumni as our guests for the Summer 2021 meetings. Even though the meetings were virtual, we hope to see them in person in the future.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Ramin Bostanabad, IDEAL Alumni, has recently earned the NASA Early Faculty award. Dr. Bostanabad received his Ph.D from Northwestern University in 2019 (advised by Dr. Wei Chen) and is now an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine (UCI). The award was given for his work on Multiscale Emulation and Deep Learning-based Assimilation for Probabilistic Prediction of Hydrologic Phenomena. More information about his award are available at: University Faculty Selected for NASA Space Tech Research Grants | NASA