CCM Colloquium: Ivo F. Sbalzarini (Dresden University of Technology)Event

Wednesday Nov 13, 2024, 10:00 AM → 11:00 AM America/New_York

3rd floor classroom (162)

TITLE:
Particle Methods: Numerical Computation on Point Clouds

ABSTRACT:
Point clouds provide a powerful and expressive abstraction for tasks across computational mathematics. They can be used as collocation point sets in numerical analysis, but also as a data structure for machine learning and statistical inference. I provide an introduction to the theory of Particle Methods, which formalizes the idea of computation over point clouds using automata theory. I then present three fundamental advancements for practical particle methods: First, I show how differential operators can be consistently approximated on point clouds in the strong sense. This also includes differential operators over vector and tensor fields, as well as differential operators on curved Riemannian manifolds. Second, I show how point clouds can be leveraged in machine learning and computer vision, enabling content-adaptive computation. Third, I present a meshfree geometric-computing framework that uses polynomial regression over point-cloud level sets to represent complex-shaped and dynamic surfaces and geometries. Together, these
developments render particle methods a viable choice for scientific computing. This is especially the case for problems involving non-parametric or dynamic geometries, as exemplified by our work on active matter models of biological tissue morphogenesis.

BIO:
Ivo F. Sbalzarini is a Professor on the Faculty of Computer Science of Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden), and he is a director of the Max-Planck Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD). Since 2021, Ivo is the Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden. He also is a tenured Senior Research Group Leader with the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany. He graduated in Mechanical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, (Willi Studer Award, ETHZ) with majors in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Control Theory. He completed his doctorate
(Dr. sc. techn.) in Computer Science at ETH Zurich (Chorafas Award, Weizmann Institute of Science). In 2006, Ivo was named Assistant Professor of Computational Science in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. In 2012, Ivo and his group moved to Dresden, where he became a founding member of the CSBD and the Chair of Scientific Computing for Systems Biology. He also serves as Area Lead for Applied AI and Big Data in the Federal Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) and Research Avenue Leader for Scientific Computing in the Cluster of Excellence "Physics of Life". Ivo's research interest focuses on meshfree particle methods for numerical computation, machine learning, and high-performance computing in
image-based computational biology.