The lecture provides an overview of recent research by the speaker’s group and collaborators on the automated discovery of material models. This research advocates a paradigm shift: moving beyond the traditional approach of calibrating unknown parameters within a preselected material model, towards the new objective of model discovery. Model discovery entails the simultaneous selection, generation, or encoding of the most suitable model to interpret experimental data, along with the calibration of its parameters.
Laura De Lorenzis,
ETH Zürich
To this end, a variety of tools are employed—ranging from sparse regression to Bayesian learning, and from formal grammars to symbolic regression.
While each tool has distinct features, they share the common aim of enforcing physics constraints and ensuring interpretability of the discovered models. Initially developed to discover a specific model within a given category (e.g. hyperelasticity, viscoelasticity, or plasticity), the approach has more recently been extended to the general case of materials belonging toan unknown class of constitutive behavior. Additional aspects such as data type, specimen design, and experimental validation are also discussed.
Laura De Lorenzis received her engineering degree and her PhD from the university in her hometown, Lecce, in southern Italy, where she first stayed as assistant and later as associate professor of solid and structural mechanics. In 2013 she moved to the TU Braunschweig, Germany, as professor and director of the Institute of Applied Mechanics. There she was founding member and first Chair (2017-2020) of the Center for Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation in Engineering. Since 2020 she is Professor of Computational Mechanics at ETH Zürich, in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering.
She was visiting scholar in several renowned institutions, including Chalmers University of Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (as holder of a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006), the Leibniz University of Hannover (with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2010-2011), the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Cape Town.
She is the recipient of several prizes, including the RILEM L’Hermite Medal 2011, the AIMETA Junior Prize 2011, the IIFC Young Investigator Award 2012, the Euromech Solid Mechanics Fellowship 2022, the IACM Fellowship 2024, two best paper awards and two student teaching prizes. In 2011 she was awarded a European Research Council Starting Researcher Grant. She has delivered over 30 plenary lectures at international conferences and authored or co-authored more than 160 papers on international journals on different topics of computational and applied mechanics. Since 2023, she is editor of Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering.