2024 Ross B. Corotis Lecture
Pascal Van Hentenryck
A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor
H. Milton Steward School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Tech
AI Engineering for Societal Impact
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Time to be Announced
AI Engineering for Societal Impact
The fusion of AI with optimization and control has the potential to deliver outcomes that are beyond the realm of these technologies when applied independently on complex engineering applications. This talk reviews the theoretical foundations underlying this fusion, including the concepts of primal and dual optimization proxies, predict then optimize, self-supervised learning, and deep multi-stage policies. The presentation also highlights these methodological developments in sustainable supply chains, electrical power systems with massive shares of distributed energy resources, and transportation systems that may transform accessibility to jobs, education, and health-care.
About Pascal Van Hentenryck
Pascal Van Hentenryck is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor at Georgia Tech., the director of the NSF Artificial Intelligence Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT), and the director of Tech-AI, the AI hub at Georgia Tech. Van Hentenryck’s research focuses on artificial intelligence for engineering and science and, in particular, energy, supply chains and manufacturing, transportation, and health care. Earlier in his career, Van Hentenryck designed and implemented several widely used optimization systems, including the constraint programming language CHIP (the foundation of modern constraint-programming systems) and the modeling language OPL (now an IBM product).
About the Ross B. Corotis Lecture
The Ross B. Corotis Lecture for Civil and Systems Engineering was established at Johns Hopkins University to commemorate the engineer who established the University’s Department of Civil and Systems Engineering. The lecture has been endowed by prominent structural engineer, Ross Corotis, which contributes to the ongoing guest seminars in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering and provides for these special lectures.
Ross B. Corotis, NAE, is an emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He researches the coordinated roles of engineering and social science in framing and communicating long-term hazard risks and resiliency for the built environment. With three degrees from MIT, he was on the faculty at Northwestern University, established the Department of Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and was Dean of Engineering at CU Boulder.
He has chaired committees on structural safety for ASCE and ACI, the Advisory Committee of IASSAR, served as science advisor for the Department of State in Washington, DC., and was editor of the journals Structural Safety and ASCE’s Journal of Engineering Mechanics. For the National Academies, he served on the Building Research Board, the Disasters Roundtable, the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, chaired the Laboratory Assessment Board, was founding chair of the Committee on NIST Technical Programs, and was chair of the Civil & Environmental Engineering section of the NAE.
He is a registered professional engineer and structural engineer, Distinguished Member of ASCE, Fellow of the Structural Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Institutes, recipient of the ASCE OPAL Lifetime Achievement Award in Education, and author of more than 250 publications.
Ross B. Corotis, NAE, Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder
On Wednesday, March 1, 2023, Ross B. Corotis delivered the inaugural Corotis Lecture. His lecture was entitled: Engineering Risk and Decision Analysis for Communities Facing Natural Hazards: A Talk in Four+ Parts.
The cost of natural disasters continues to rise around the world, in part because of population growth, urbanization, and the pressures they place on land use, and in part because policy makers continue to undervalue natural hazard risk in long-term planning. Yet these hazards are critical to community sustainability and fundamental to the concept of resilience.
The shortcoming in reducing the vulnerability of infrastructure lies partly with engineers and risk professionals, who must be aware of public perceptions of risk and political process rationality, which present inherent incompatibilities. Engineers need to know which measures of risk are most meaningful or relevant to decision makers, and then be able to communicate those risks, and the costs and benefits of mitigation, in concise, credible, and meaningful terms. This seminar will discuss four related aspects: approximate reliability methods for community-wide resilience, issues of risk perception, practical rationality of elected officials, and the role for generalized information theory as an alternative to probability. View the event brochure with more information.