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Prof. Chen Receives the Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award

Congratulations to Prof. Chen for receiving the Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award. The joint award given by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Pi Tau Sigma National Mechanical Engineering Honor Society recognizes one individual each year for their significant contributions and achievements in mechanical engineering for more than 20 years or more following graduation. Prof. Chen is the second woman to receive the Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award.

She was recognized for the award based on her seminal contributions to design under uncertainty that have advanced both theoretical development and practical applications of statistical analysis and probability theory in engineering practice, outstanding leadership in advancing interdisciplinary research and the mechanical engineering profession, and her work’s impact on education.

Read the full news on McCormick’s website:

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Akshay Defends his Ph.D. Dissertation

Our lab member Akshay Iyer successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on August 10th 2021, under the title Data Centric Design for Microstructural Material Systems. Congratulations, Akshay!

Following his planned graduation this summer, Akshay will continue his career at CNA Insurance here at Chicago! We wish him the best and good luck in his future endeavors!

Featured by McCormick: Our Materials Design

Our lab’s research on data-driven design of new materials with small datasets, a collaboration with Prof. James Rondinelli‘s group, has been featured by Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. This research, which includes PhD student Akshay Iyer, is developing an advanced optimization engine (AOE) that utilizes our latent variable Gaussian process modeling method to address the challenges of materials design when only a limited amount of data is available. Please read the feature article here!

Akshay’s Paper Featured on MSDE Cover

Congratulations to Akshay Iyer, whose paper “Data Centric Nanocomposites Design via Mixed-Variable Bayesian Optimization”, has been published in and featured on the cover of Molecular Systems Design & Engineering (Issue 8)! The artwork was prepared by Askhay himself. Please be sure to read the paper, referenced below.


Iyer, A., Zhang, Y., Prasad, A., Gupta, P., Tao, S., Wang, Y., Prabhune, P., Schadler, L.S., Brinson, L.C. and Chen, W., 2020. Data centric nanocomposites design via mixed-variable Bayesian optimizationMolecular Systems Design & Engineering.

Akshay Iyer's MSDE Cover Paper

IDEAL Attends Virtual IDETC 2020

From August 17 through 19, IDEAL attended the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) 2020, which was held virtually. Two of our papers (led by Liwei Wang and Yu-Chin Chan) received the Papers of Distinction Award in the Design Automation Conference section (DAC)! In total, our group was represented by 5 papers out of the 118 accepted into DAC this year (see below).

Also, our former postdocs, Zhenghui Sha (currently Assistant Professor at University of Arkansas) and Faez Ahmed (currently Assistant Professor at MIT), co-organized the 2020 ASME-CIE Hackathon: Identifying, Extracting, Analyzing Value from Large Unstructured Data Sets in Mechanical Engineering. Some of our group members competed in teams and won prizes – congratulations to Yaxin Cui and Umar Farooq Ghumman!


IDETC Papers
  • Liwei Wang, Siyu Tao, Ping Zhu, Wei Chen. Data-Driven Multiscale Topology Optimization Using Multi-Response Latent Variable Gaussian Process (DETC2020-22595). Session: DAC 10-2: Design of Engineering Materials and Structures.
  • Yu-Chin Chan, Faez Ahmed, Liwei Wang, Wei Chen. METASET: An Automated Data Selection Method for Scalable Data-Driven Design of Metamaterials (DETC2020-22681). Session: DAC 3-1: Data-Driven Design.
  • Siyu Tao, Anton van Beek, Daniel W. Apley, Wei Chen. “Bayesian Optimization for Simulation-Based Design of Multi-Model Systems” (DETC2020-22651). Session: DAC 14-1: Metamodel-Based Design Optimization.
  • Anton van Beek, Umar Farooq Ghumman, Joydeep Munshi, Siyu Tao, TeYu Chien, Ganesh Balasubramanian, Matthew Plumlee, Daniel Apley, Wei Chen. “Scalable Objective-Driven Batch Sampling in Simulation-Based Design for Models With Heteroscedastic Noise” (DETC2020-22629). Session: DAC 18-2: Simulation-Based Design Under Uncertainty.
  • Yaxin Cui, Faez Ahmed, Zhenghui Sha, Lijun Wang, Yan Fu, Wei Chen. “A Weighted Network Modeling Approach for Analyzing Product Competition” (DETC2020-22591). Session: DAC 7-1: Design for Market Systems.

Hackathon Awards
  • 3rd place for Problem 1: Umar Farooq Ghumman along with students from MIT and Stevens Institute of Technology. “Generating a Data-Driven Surrogate Model for Machine Damage Accumulation“.
  • 2nd place for Problem 2: Yaxin Cui along with students from UT Austin. “Melt Pool Prediction in Addictive Manufacturing: A Hybrid Approach Based on the Process Parameter“.

IDEAL Hosts Alumni Panel

As part of our summer panel series, we were honored to invite four lab alumni back (virtually) to IDEAL. The panel discussed their experiences during and after their Ph.D. or postdoctoral positions at IDEAL, imparting our current members and summer interns with words of advice and encouragement. The panelists were:

  • Prof. Harrison Kim (Postdoc, 2003-2004): Professor, Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and Willett Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); director of the Enterprise Systems Optimization Laboratory as well as the Hoeft Tech and Management Program at UIUC. Prof. Kim has received numerous awards and researches engineering design, analytics, and systems optimization.
  • Dr. Zhen Jiang (Ph.D., 2015): Lead Analytics Scientist / Analytics Supervisor, Ford Innovation Center, Palo Alto, CA. Zhen’s dissertation was Model Uncertainty Quantification and Uncertainty Reduction in Simulation-Based Systems Design (co-advised by Prof. Dan Apley).
  • Dr. Mingxian Wang (Ph.D., 2016): Research Scientist, Amazon Boston. In the Alexa Entertainment Spoken Language Understanding team, Mingxian researches Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). She previously worked as a Data Scientist at Ford’s Global Data, Insight & Analytics organization, where she led the research collaboration between Ford and Northwestern University.
  • Dr. Xiaolin Li (Ph.D., 2018): Software Engineer, Microsoft, WA. Xiaolin’s dissertation was Interphase Modeling and Data Analytical Approaches for Polymer Nanocomposites Design (co-advised by Prof. Cate Brinson).

It was impressive to learn how their time with Prof. Wei Chen has helped them reach success in each of their careers since leaving IDEAL! Please enjoy our Zoom group photo below.

 

Dr. Faez Ahmed’s Proposal Funded

Our Postdoc, Dr. Faez Ahmed, who was already offered a faculty position at MIT before joining us at IDEAL, has received funding for his first proposal, together with Co-PI Dr. Daniel Frey! The title of his project is AI-driven Design Synthesis for Personalized Bicycles, awarded by the MechE Mathworks Seed Fund Program for $100k in Year 1. The goal of the project is to develop an automated method to generate new bicycle designs which meet the specific needs of a user, hence increasing access to bicycles for a broader spectrum of people. Congratulations!