Colloquium

Speaker: Petros Koumoutsakos, Harvard SEAS

Title: Machine Learning and Scientific Computing: There is plenty of room in the middle

Abstract: Over the last thirty years we have experienced more than a billion-fold increase in hardware capabilities and a dizzying pace of acquiring and transmitting massive amounts of data. Scientific Computing and, more lately, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been key beneficiaries of these advances. In this talk I would outline the need for bridging the decades long advances in Scientific Computing with those of AI. I will use examples from fluid mechanics to argue for forming alloys of AI and simulations for their prediction and control. I will present novel algorithms for learning the Effective Dynamics (LED) of complex systems and a fusion of multi- agent reinforcement learning and scientific computing (SciMARL) for modeling and control of turbulent flows. I will also show our recent work on Optimizing a Discrete Loss (ODIL) that outperforms popular techniques such as PINNs by several orders of magnitude.

I will juxtapose successes and failures and argue that the proper fusion of scientific computing and AI expertise are essential to advance scientific frontiers.