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Events
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May5
EVENT DETAILS
lessABSTRACT
GScientific Machine Learning (SciML) integrates data-driven inference with physical modeling to solve complex problems in science and engineering. However, the design of SciML architectures, loss formulations, and training strategies remains an expert-driven research process, requiring extensive experimentation and problem-specific insights. We introduce AgenticSciML, a collaborative multi-agent system in which over 10 specialized AI agents collaborate to propose, critique, and refine SciML solutions through structured reasoning and iterative evolution. The framework integrates structured debate, retrieval-augmented method memory, and ensemble-guided evolutionary search, enabling the agents to generate and assess new hypotheses about architectures and optimization procedures. Across physics-informed learning and operator learning tasks, the framework discovers solution methods that outperform single-agent and human-designed baselines by up to four orders of magnitude in error reduction. The agents produce novel strategies—including adaptive mixture-of-expert architectures, decomposition-based PINNs, and physics-informed operator learning models—that do not appear explicitly in the curated knowledge base. These results show that collaborative reasoning among AI agents can yield emergent methodological innovation, suggesting a path toward scalable, transparent, and autonomous discovery in scientific computing.
BIO
George Karniadakis is from Crete. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow. He received his S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1984/87). He was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and subsequently joined the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford/NASA Ames. He joined Princeton University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and as Associate Faculty in the Program of Applied and Computational Mathematics. He was a Visiting Professor at Caltech in 1993 in the Aeronautics Department and joined Brown University as Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Center for Fluid Mechanics in 1994. After becoming a full professor in 1996, he continued to be a Visiting Professor and Senior Lecturer of Ocean/Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is an AAAS Fellow (2018–), Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM, 2010–), Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS, 2004–), Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, 2003–), and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA, 2006–). He received the William Benter Award (2026), the SES G.I. Taylor Medal (2014), the SIAM/ACM Prize on Computational Science & Engineering (2021), the Alexander von Humboldt Award (2017), the SIAM Ralf E. Kleinman Award (2015), the J. Tinsley Oden Medal (2013), and the CFD Award (2007) by the US Association for Computational Mechanics. His h-index is 160 (highest in Applied Mathematics) and he has been cited over 156,000 times.BIO
Treasured member of the Northwestern faculty from 1977 until his death in 2014, Ted Belytschko was a central figure in the McCormick community and an internationally renowned researcher who made major contributions to the field of computational structural mechanics. One of the most cited researchers in engineering science, Belytschko developed explicit finite element methods that are widely used in crashworthiness analysis and virtual prototyping in the auto industry. He received numerous honors, including membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a founding director of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, and in 2012, the association named a medal in his honor. The ASME Applied Mechanics Award was renamed the ASME Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Division Award in November 2007. Belytschko also served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, and he was co-author of the books “Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures” and “A First Course in Finite Elements.”
ABOUT TED BELYTSCHKO
Treasured member of the Northwestern faculty from 1977 until his death in 2014, Ted Belytschko was a central figure in the McCormick community and an internationally renowned researcher who made major contributions to the field of computational structural mechanics. One of the most cited researchers in engineering science, Belytschko developed explicit finite element methods that are widely used in crashworthiness analysis and virtual prototyping in the auto industry. He received numerous honors, including membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a founding director of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, and in 2012, the association named a medal in his honor. The ASME Applied Mechanics Award was renamed the ASME Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Division Award in November 2007. Belytschko also served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, and he was co-author of the books “Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures” and “A First Course in Finite Elements.”Co-sponsored by the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering
TIME Tuesday, May 5, 2026 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION 2350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center map it
CONTACT Jeremy Wells jeremywells@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
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May14
EVENT DETAILS
lessMechanics of architected materials across length and time scales
Abstract
Architected materials (or mechanical metamaterials) across length scales—from nanometers to centimeters— have enabled previously unachievable mechanical properties through a variety of 3D material morphologies. Significant advances in our understanding of these materials have thus pointed to structure-property relations that lead to unique macroscopic mechanical properties. Despite this progress, several hurdles have precluded widespread application of these materials to solve engineering challenges. First, clear routes to scalably design and fabricate these architected materials have remained elusive; with most designs reported to date targeting high stiffness but low deformability. Second, since most of the studies to date have characterized architected materials under quasi-static deformation, their dynamic-property regime remains to be fully characterized and understood—essential to a variety of envisioned applications. In this talk, we present efforts towards addressing these long-standing challenges, specifically by proposing routes for designing architected materials with extreme compliance and by presenting two types of high-throughput characterization methods that enable exploration of architected materials under dynamic conditions. We discuss efforts implementing and understanding compliant architected materials by proposing metamaterial design paradigms inspired by polymer-network architectures. We also present efforts performing non-contact characterization of materials through laser-induced vibrational signatures, providing a new route to uncover dynamic elastic responses of materials and unparalleled throughput rates. Lastly, we discuss efforts characterizing architected materials under extreme dynamic conditions through use of microparticle impact experiments at the microscale, shedding light on energy dissipation mechanisms that emerge from the use of 3D microstructure.
Bio
Carlos Portela is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Portela received his Ph.D. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he was given the Centennial Award for the best thesis in Mechanical and Civil Engineering. His research lies at the intersection of mechanics, nano-to-macro fabrication, and materials science with the objective of designing and testing novel materials—with features spanning from nanometers to centimeters—that yield unprecedented mechanical and acoustic properties. Portela is the recipient of the 2026 ONR YIP Award, a 2024 ARO Early Career Program Award, was recognized as an MIT TR Innovator Under 35 in 2022, and was a recipient of the 2022 NSF CAREER Award. His teaching efforts have been recognized by MIT’s 2025 Jr. Bose Award and the 2023 Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching.
TIME Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Jeremy Wells jeremywells@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)