Seminar: Advanced Infrastructure: Is Artificial Intelligence going to be a game changer?

19 Mar 2019 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Presenter/Speaker: Alessandro Fascetti, School of Engineering, University of Waikato
Location: G.1.15

Computational methods have gained increasing attention in engineering and materials science applications, as they allow for the prediction of the failure of systems that would be prohibitive to test experimentally (either for their size or the external actions to simulate). In order to describe complex phenomena such as crack nucleation and propagation, computational tools must be able to accurately describe the material at the length scale at which they occur (the so-called ‘local’ scale). Meaningful predictions, however, rely on the description of the response of entire engineering systems (‘global’ scale). The exponential increase in computational power recorded in the last decade will inevitably lead to the possibility of simulating every atom or molecule in a bridge or a medical implant in a not-so-distant future. Until that day arrives, current practices to take into account physical phenomena that happen at different length scales revolve around the concept of multiscaling: we can solve the problem in exam at different observational levels (i.e. the local and global scales) and bridge the information between them by means of appropriate mathematical theories. In my recent works, I am investigating the possibility to embed classical multiscale theories in the framework of Artificial Intelligence, with the ultimate goal of increasing accuracy and efficiency of the model without compromising on the detailed physical description of the numerical models. We will discuss possible applications of Artificial Intelligence techniques to the regional-scale simulation of a flood protection infrastructure.

BIO:
Dr. Alessandro Fascetti received his Master’s degree in 2012 in Civil Engineering from the University of Rome “Sapienza”. He obtained a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the same institution in 2016. During his studies, he spent 18 months as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Davis. In 2016 he became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Multiscale Computational Mechanics Laboratory (MCML) of Vanderbilt University in Nashville (TN). He joined The University of Waikato in 2018 to serve as a Lecturer in Civil Engineering. Dr. Fascetti conducts research on the multiscale random lattice modeling of different kinds of composite materials used in structure and infrastructure applications. His work focuses on failure mechanics as well as durability aspects, combining multiscale experimental information for the validation of the numerical models.