Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March
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Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Tue, Mar 02, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Hadi Meidani, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Scientific Machine Learning for Efficient Computational Design of Engineering Systems
Abstract:
The focus of this talk is on using deep neural networks (DNNs) to approximate the response of engineering systems and facilitate their design and control. DNNs can be trained using supervised learning approaches which require large datasets of input-output samples. In engineering applications, these input-output samples are typically obtained from high-fidelity Finite Element or Finite Difference solvers. In applications where these samples are costly to obtain, supervised learning may be prohibitively slow. In this talk, I will present our recent contributions in this domain, which includes (1) using DNNs to accelerate robust topology optimization via a lower-dimensional representation and (2) developing a PDE-based simulation-free deep learning approach that directly exploit the physical laws in an efficient way.
Biography: Hadi Meidani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2012. Prior to joining UIUC, he was a postdoctoral research associate at USC in (2012-2013) and in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah (2013-2014). He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award to study fast computational models for infrastructure systems. His research interests are uncertainty quantification, scientific machine learning, and design under uncertainty.
Host: Dr. Roger Ghanem
Location: Zoom: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97228056404; Meeting ID: 972 2805 6404: Passcode: 864779
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Tue, Mar 09, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Arghavan Louhghalam, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Talk Title: Physics-based and Data-driven Modeling from eco-friendly roadway network to infrastructure resilience analytics
Abstract: Development of sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems requires novel frameworks that leverage the explosion of data available through advances in sensors, internet, mobility as well as computational models to design for and respond to the challenges of 21st century. In this talk, I will showcase how physics-constrained data-driven modeling enables development of quantitative platforms for identification, monitoring and projection of infrastructure performance. In the first part of the presentation I will describe a citizen-enabled framework to monitor, in real-time, road surface condition, vehicle excess energy consumption, and the related environmental impact at network scale. Unlike the widely used approaches for road infrastructure monitoring that rely solely on data and empirical models, this framework integrates physics-compatible models of road-vehicle interaction with crowdsourced data to characterize the parameters of system. The proposed data-centric platform has the potential to not only help transportation authorities make optimal decisions in the allocation of resources to road maintenance but also guide route selection by individual drivers or fleet owners. This will be a key player in a rapidly evolving world where an accelerating climate change is pressing for dramatic measures to reduce carbon footprint and GHG emissions. The second part of this talk will be focused on modeling damage using an energy-based formulation of lattice element method (LEM). I will describe the potential of mean force (PMF) approach, widely used in statistical physics and introduce a hybrid PMF formulation of LEM to efficiently model fracture and crack growth in heterogenous media. The framework is validated and utilized for meso-scale simulations to estimate the effective fracture properties of heterogeneous materials. The hybrid approach is shown to be a viable choice due to its flexibility in modeling discontinuity and its computational efficiency and reliable results. Finally, I will discuss our efforts to leverage the versatility of this framework and adapt the formulation as a means for efficient characterization of failure and damage in structural systems to establish an efficient quantitative tool for resilience analytics.
Biography: Arghavan Louhghalam is an assistant professor in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering Department at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She also holds a research affiliate position in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Prior to that she was a postdoctoral research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD in Engineering Mechanics from the Department of Civil Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests lie in the area of engineering mechanics, physics-constrained data-driven modeling, and applied statistics with particular emphasis on development of smart solutions for resilient and sustainable built environment. Dr Louhghalam is a recipient of NSF early CAREER award and her research on citizen-enabled crowdsourced monitoring of transportation infrastructure has been recognized nationally and featured in media outlets such as the New York Times.
Host: Dr. Roger Ghanem
Location: Zoom: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97228056404; Meeting ID: 972 2805 6404: Passcode: 864779
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Tue, Mar 16, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Wenjing (Angela) Zhang, Associate Professor, Executive MBA in Management of Technology, Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Denmark
Talk Title: Shaping our water technology by functional materials and electrospinning
Abstract: With the ever-increasing growth of population and advancements in medical treatments, a growing number of contaminants are entering the aqueous environment from human activity. In particular, for industrialized countries, the concerns for public health and environmental impact are exemplified by the widespread use of pharmaceuticals and their significance as contaminants of emerging concerns (CECs). Some of CECs with highly persistent could lead to detrimental effects on survival and growth of aquatic organisms. Conventional municipal wastewater treatment technologies based on activated sludge remains ineffective. Thus, there is an urgent need for a sustainable and effective wastewater treatment technology to remediate water.
In this talk, I would like to introduce the research projects where we combine functional material synthesis and electrospinning to structure the adsorbents/catalysts into a hiarchiary 3-dimentional reactor. By harvesting solar or mechanical energies, we are able to capture and degrade the contaminants while the clean water flows through.
Biography: Dr. Wenjing (Angela) Zhang is an Associate Professor and leader of Advanced material and membrane research group in the Department of Environmental Engineering at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Currently she has 9 Postdoc/PhD students in her research group with state-of-art facilities in the fields of catalyst synthesis, electrospinning, solution plasma, electrochemistry, photocatalytic chemistry and membrane filtration. She received her MSc in Mechanical Engineering in 2005 and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2009 at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Prior to joining DTU, she was a Research Associate at Vanderbilt University in the United States for 3 years, where she obtained substantial experience in conducting independent award-winning research, mentoring PhD and undergraduate students, writing successful government subsidy proposals (US Department of Energy) and collaborating on research projects with renowned global companies (3M Corporation and Merck KGaA).
Host: Dr. Amy Childress
Location: Zoom: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97228056404; Meeting ID: 972 2805 6404: Passcode: 864779
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Tue, Mar 30, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jack W. Baker, Ph.D., Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University
Talk Title: Simulation of regional post-earthquake recovery for performance-based
Abstract: State of the art performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) procedures such as FEMA P-58 generally treat buildings as islands, with respect to modeling regional impacts and post-earthquake recovery. This talk presents an overview of recent research to advance direct simulation of regional impacts and recovery within a PBEE framework. Specifically, work to scale single-building performance-based assessments to a regional scale is demonstrated. Then, refinements to include the impact of damaged roads and neighboring buildings on repair and recovery timelines is presented. Finally,a coupled assessment of economic and physical impacts is illustrated, in order to account for private-sector decision-making and regional industrial capacity constraints on recovery. Collectively, these developments move us closer to regional-scale performance assessments that can incorporate a broader range of factors in forecasts, and thus can support a broader range of decision-making to increase community resilience.
Biography: Professor Baker's work focuses on the development and use of probabilistic and statistical tools for managing risk due to extreme loads on the built environment. He studies risk to spatially distributed systems, characterization of earthquake ground motions, and probabilistic risk assessments for a number of types of structures. Professor Baker joined Stanford in 2006 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), where he was a visiting researcher in the Department of Structural Engineering. He has degrees in Structural Engineering (Stanford, M.S. 2002,Ph.D. 2005), Statistics (Stanford, M.S. 2004) and Mathematics and Physics(Whitman College, B.A. 2000). His awards include the Shah Family Innovation Prize from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the Early Achievement Research Award from the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability, the Walter L. Huber Prize from ASCE, the Helmut Krawinkler Award from the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, and the Eugene L. Grant Award for excellence in teaching from Stanford.
Host: Dr. Roger Ghanem
Location: Zoom: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97228056404; Meeting ID: 972 2805 6404: Passcode: 864779
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes