You're invited to a seminar with Mr. Sourav Saha, a doctoral candidate in theoretical and applied mechanics at Northwestern University, titled "Mechanistic Computational Intelligence for Next Generation of Engineering Software." 

Abstract: The field of computational mechanics is evolving from software 1.0, with explicit, task-specific programming, to software 2.0, which uses data and optimization. However, a direct transition to software 2.0 is extremely difficult for engineering science because a) data is scarce for many engineering systems, b) modeling complex multiphysics problem require extensive calibration of parameters, and c) augmenting the experimental data with the computational model is extremely time-consuming. There exists a gap in the contemporary computational and/or theoretical methods that can engender the next generation of engineering software 2.0. In this talk, a synergistic computational and theoretical framework called Mechanistic Computational Intelligence (MCI) will be presented to address this gap. The talk will consist of two stages: in stage 1, the speaker will summarize the mathematical underpinning of the MCI. In the later stage, the speaker will cite examples from his past research on how the MCI can elevate the manufacturing process-structure-property models and multiscale materials system design in the context of three general types of problems encountered in science and engineering. The first type of problem occurs when there is no known closed-form physical equation. The second type arises when the knowledge of governing laws is incomplete. Lastly, the third type of problem involves known governing equations where computational speed needs improvement. All of these three types of problem can be solved with a unifying data structure, and interpolation scheme. The talk will shed light on how to use the MCI methods to create engineering software 2.0 in the future. 

Biography: Sourav Saha is a PhD candidate in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois working with Professor Wing Kam Liu. Mr. Saha completed his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in 2015 and 2017, respectively, and joined Northwestern in 2018. Before joining Northwestern, he served as a faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at BUET. Mr. Saha works in the general field of multiscale modeling of hierarchical materials, computational modeling of advanced manufacturing processes, scientific and interpretable machine learning, and modeling of nanoscale transport phenomena and mechanics. He worked as a visiting researcher at Sandia National Laboratory from October 2022 to March 2023. Mr. Saha’s scientific contributions include several articles in reputed journals in computational science, 4 patents, an ongoing book on Mechanistic Computational Intelligence, serving as referee for reputed peer reviewed journals, and organizing international academic conferences. For his work, Mr. Saha has won several awards and fellowships including Richter Fellowship, NSF INTERN award, NIST AM Bench 2022 Competition, and Cabell Fellowship from Northwestern University.