Colloquium - Yizhou Sun, "AI for Science and Engineering: From Simulation to Design"

Abstract: 
Recently, AI has demonstrated its power in advancing science and engineering across different areas. Traditionally, AI technologies are mainly developed for forward prediction/simulation, while more recently how to leverage AI to directly optimize the design space receives increasing attention. In this talk, we will introduce our recent research in both directions, demonstrated by real-world applications such as fluid dynamics, material science, and chip design. In particular, we will discuss (1) what are the unique challenges raised by these applications, (2) how to incorporate domain knowledge into the AI models, and (3) how GenAIs potentially further advance this field.
 
Bio:
Yizhou Sun is a professor at the department of computer science of UCLA and an Amazon Scholar. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. Her principal research interest is on mining graphs/networks, and more generally in data mining, machine learning, and network science, with a focus on modeling novel problems and proposing scalable algorithms for large-scale, real-world applications. She is a pioneer researcher in mining heterogeneous information network, with a recent focus on deep learning on graphs, AI for Chip Design, AI for Science, and neural symbolic reasoning. Yizhou has over 180 publications in books, journals, and major conferences. Tutorials of her research have been given in many premier conferences. She is a recipient of multiple Best Paper Awards, ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award, Yahoo ACE (Academic Career Enhancement) Award, NSF CAREER Award, CS@ILLINOIS Distinguished Educator Award, Amazon Research Awards (twice), Okawa Foundation Research Award, VLDB Test of Time Award, WSDM Test of Time Award, ACM Distinguished Member, IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch, and SDM/IBM faculty award. She is a general co-chair of SIGKDD 2023, PC co-chair of ICLR 2024, and PC co-chair of SIGKDD 2025.