Florian Schaefer “Solvers, Models, Learners: Statistical Inspiration for Scientific Computing”
Please join us on Tuesday, October 10, 2023 at 12:00pm in Clark Hall Room 110 and on ZOOM for the CIS & MINDS Seminar Series:
Guest: Florian Schaefer
Assistant Professor
Georgia Tech
Topic: “Solvers, Models, Learners: Statistical Inspiration for Scientific Computing”
Join Zoom Meeting: https://wse.zoom.us/j/95386212146
Passcode: cis&minds
Florian Schaefer
Assistant Professor
Georgia Tech
“Solvers, Models, Learners: Statistical Inspiration for Scientific Computing”
Abstract:
The convergence of scientific computing with statistics and machine learning is an exciting development in scientific computing.
In this talk, I will present two lines of work that blur the line between statistical inference and numerical computation.
The first part of the talk presents state-of-the-art algorithms for solving elliptic PDEs by interpreting them as Gaussian processes and exploiting their conditional independence properties. This approach allows the efficient learning of elliptic solution operators from solution pairs, with promising empirical results on fractional order PDEs and empirical closure models of turbulent flows.
The second part of the talk discusses how to mitigate the formation of shock singularities in the barotropic Euler equations using an inviscid regularization. This work combines the seminal work of Vladimir Arnold on geometric hydrodynamics with ideas from interior point methods for positive definite programming and the information geometry of Amari and Chentsov.
Biography: Florian Schäfer is an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he received his PhD in applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, working with Houman Owhadi. Before that, he received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics at the University of Bonn. His research interests lie at the interface of numerical computation, statistical inference, and competitive games.