Data-driven discovery of governing equations and physical laws

Series
Applied and Computational Mathematics Seminar
Time
Monday, September 18, 2017 - 1:55pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Prof. Nathan Kutz – University of Washington, Applied Mathematics
Organizer
Martin Short
The emergence of data methods for the sciences in the last decade has been enabled by the plummeting costs of sensors, computational power, and data storage. Such vast quantities of data afford us new opportunities for data-driven discovery, which has been referred to as the 4th paradigm of scientific discovery. We demonstrate that we can use emerging, large-scale time-series data from modern sensors to directly construct, in an adaptive manner, governing equations, even nonlinear dynamics, that best model the system measured using modern regression techniques. Recent innovations also allow for handling multi-scale physics phenomenon and control protocols in an adaptive and robust way. The overall architecture is equation-free in that the dynamics and control protocols are discovered directly from data acquired from sensors. The theory developed is demonstrated on a number of canonical example problems from physics, biology and engineering.