News & EventsDepartment Events
Events
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Feb4
EVENT DETAILS
lessAbstract: This talk introduces a framework for creating interactive, physically-realistic world models by merging advanced computer vision with differentiable physics simulations. Traditional approaches to building world models often force a trade-off between high visual fidelity and accurate physics. Our work bridges this gap by leveraging differentiable programming to build high-fidelity, interactive digital twins directly from real-world sensor data. We demonstrate how modern computer vision techniques, including Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting, can reconstruct detailed 3D scenes from sparse video inputs. The core of our methodology is the integration of these reconstructions with fully differentiable physics engines, such as the Differentiable Material Point Method (DiffMPM). This novel combination enables us to solve challenging inverse problems: by comparing simulated outcomes with real-world observations, we use gradient-based optimization to automatically infer latent physical properties, such as soil friction angles and material stiffness, directly from video. To overcome the computational demands of these physics solvers, we utilize Graph Neural Simulators (GNS) as a learned surrogate model that significantly accelerates simulation time. GNS represents physical systems as graphs of interacting particles, achieving speedups of over 100x compared to traditional methods while generalizing effectively to new scenarios. We also present a hybrid GNS-MPM approach that interleaves the learned simulator with the numerical solver to ensure long-term accuracy and conservation of physical laws. The practical applications of this framework are highlighted through several key examples in robotics and autonomy. We present a system for generating Dynamic Costmaps from drone footage, where real-time 3D reconstruction and GNS-powered weather simulations predict terrain changes to enable safer navigation for autonomous vehicles. We also apply these methods to critical challenges in lunar exploration, such as simulating rover-regolith interaction to mitigate operational hazards. Ultimately, this research paves the way toward interactive "X2Sim" systems that can generate complex physical simulations from natural language or video prompts, opening a new paradigm for the design, control, and optimization of autonomous systems.
Bio: Dr. Krishna Kumar is a J. Neils Thompson Centennial Teaching Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a Core-Faculty at the Oden Institute of Computational Sciences. His research is at the intersection of AI/ML, numerical simulations, and robotics. He directs a $7M NSF-funded national ecosystem for AI integration in engineering and received an NSF CAREER Award in 2024. His research involves developing physical AI and control methods for autonomous manipulation of deformable materials and navigation in extreme environments. As an educator, he received the Dean's Outstanding Teaching Award and runs coding clubs for kids at Austin Public Libraries.
TIME Wednesday, February 4, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Feb6
EVENT DETAILS
lessAbstract: Chlorination is the use of chlorine as a disinfecting agent to eliminate bacteria from drinking water. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicians and sanitary engineers only used chlorine on sewage or experimentally to treat water during outbreaks of typhoid fever, but not as a permanent measure. Experts and citizens alike distrusted chlorine due to the unpleasant odour and taste it added to water and safety concerns. After all, putting chemicals into the water was, for some, contrary to the idea that ‘pure water’ was better obtained by protecting watersheds than by treating an already polluted source. Chlorination was first adopted as a permanent water treatment technology in the United States in 1908, and from there, it spread worldwide, radically changing water management and reducing mortality and morbidity on an impressive scale. My talk will answer the question of why this technology, despite initial resistance, was adopted so quickly.
Bio: Edisson Aguilar Torres is a historian of technology and Latin America. His research explores the interconnection between state formation and the construction of small-scale infrastructure for water supply systems in the Colombian countryside during the 20th century, as well as the global history of water treatment technologies. His book manuscript, The Delegatory State: Water infrastructure, Community, and State Formation in 20th-century Colombia, challenges notions of the state as an overly centralising project that destroys local knowledge and practices by imposing large-scale infrastructures. Instead, it shows how the Colombian state decided to partially delegate water provision in rural areas to local communities, using a system that relied on state engineering, small-scale water supply systems, local management and maintenance, and Indigenous and peasant labour traditions. The rationale behind that decision combined ideals of citizenship participation with more practical concerns about the costs for the state of providing public goods directly. Insufficient investment, though, hindered full access to drinking water in the countryside, creating water inequalities that persist today. Pipes for the Community addresses the socio-technical system that came to dominate water supply in the Colombian rural areas as a way to understand the importance of small-scale technology in the landscape of modernity.
TIME Friday, February 6, 2026 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Feb18
EVENT DETAILS
lessTBA
TIME Wednesday, February 18, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Feb27
EVENT DETAILS
lessTBA
TIME Friday, February 27, 2026 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Mar11
EVENT DETAILS
lessTBA
TIME Wednesday, March 11, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)