Title:

Mechanical Engineering and AI Safety: A Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Approach

Speaker:

Dr. Fariborz Farahmand

Affiliation:

Georgia Tech, ECE

When:

Tuesday, January 14, 2025 at 11:00:00 AM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Love Building, Room 184

Host:

Rick Neu
rick.neu@gatech.edu

Abstract

Where AI systems are increasingly and rapidly impacting engineering, science, and our daily lives, progress in AI safety is lagging. In this talk, I will discuss how mechanical engineers, especially mechanics of materials and advanced manufacturing engineers, and computer scientists can collaborate on addressing AI safety issues, and the mutual benefits of this collaboration. First, I shed light on some of the main issues with AI safety, present my vision for mechanical engineers to take a leadership on addressing these issues and offer examples of immediate contributions and new collaborative opportunities to realize this vision. Applying mechanics of materials methods for quantifying AI safety, causal (vs. statistical) inference for fatigue and fracture mechanics, human intelligence for advanced manufacturing, and probabilistic graphical models for manufacturing digital twin are among these examples. Next, I will focus on preparing AI-skilled engineers. I will present examples from an educational module that I developed and implemented, as part of an ongoing project with the National Science Foundation, where 117 engineering undergraduate students, with no related background, could successfully use a Turing Award (Nobel Prize of Computing) winning research in their homework. Then, I present examples of an ongoing collaborative effort on developing new courses focused on advancing mechanical engineering students' abilities from applying physics-based modeling to data-driven and physics-informed machine learning approaches.

Biography

Fariborz Farahmand is a research faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Fariborz received his master's in structural mechanics from the University of Manitoba, Canada, his master's and Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Purdue. Enjoying writing graduate thesis in both structural mechanics and computer science have led Fariborz to his current research interests that are in AI safety and security and their applications in mechanics of materials and advanced manufacturing engineering, systems engineering, cyber-physical systems, human-level AI, and probabilistic reasoning. Introducing do-operator, a mathematical operator for intervention (vs conditioning) to fatigue and fracture mechanics research, pioneering applications of causal (vs statistical) inference, behavioral economics, and vector space to security engineering, and integrating, for the first time, human-level AI research in undergraduate engineering education are some examples of his research contributions. Since coming to Georgia Tech, Fariborz has been the principal investigator of three National Science Foundation Awards, and projects supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Dept. of Homeland Security, and Georgia Tech Research Institute. His research and teaching have been recognized by various awards and have been adapted and implemented by international organizations around the world. Fariborz is an elected Senior Member of IEEE and its Computer Society, and a member of ASME.