Dr. Tom I-P. Shih of Purdue University will be visiting this Friday, September 19, to give a seminar.  Please see abstract and biography below.  Light refreshments will be provided.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) was envisioned as early as 1872 in a book entitled “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler as an eventuality of Darwin’s theory on evolution and the Industrial Revolution. With today’s exa-scale computational power, AI is starting to impact humankind in meaningful ways. These include precision agriculture, computer vision, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, financial market analyses, medical diagnosis, manufacturing, and maintenance. Also, there are generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Chatbot, Co-Pilot, …. Despite the advances, AI has had less success on impacting physics and engineering. This talk examines some recent advances. It also examines how human intelligence has advanced fluid mechanics and heat transfer and how that knowledge could be incorporated into machine learning to develop generalizable reduced-order models that not only encapsulate understanding of human experts but also satisfies conservation principles in analytical form for design and analysis of complex engineered systems involving fluid flow. 

TOM I-P. SHIH is professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, where he served as the head of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 2009 to 2019. Prior to joining Purdue, he was a mechanical engineer at NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center and served on the faculties at the University of Florida, Carnegie Mellon University, Michigan State University, and Iowa State University (chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering, 2003–2009). Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of the AIAA Journal and serves on the advisory boards of the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Michigan and the Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University. He also serves on the review board of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Collaborative Center for Aeronautical Sciences. Previously, he has served on the Aeronautics Committee of the NASA Advisory Council (2018-21) and chaired the AIAA Committee on Higher Education (2016-23) and the Aerospace Department Chair Association (2005-06). Tom started his undergraduate education at West Virginia University but completed his B.S.E. at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. His M.S.E. and Ph.D.  degrees are from The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics  and Astronautics (AIAA) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and received the 2010  Distinguished Engineering Educator Award from the Engineers’ Council of San Fernando Valley, the 2015 AIAA Energy Systems Award, the 2020 AIAA Thermophysics Award, the Mechanical Engineering Alumni Merit Award  from The University of Michigan in 2023, and the NCKU Distinguished Alumni Award from National Cheng Kung  University in 2023.