CCIMI Colloquium: Mark Girolami - The Statistical Finite Element Method

The event will be held on Wednesday 13th November at 5pm, at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge and will be followed with a wine reception.

It is free to attend but registration is required.

Abstract:

The finite element method (FEM) is one of the great triumphs of applied mathematics, numerical analysis and software development. Recent developments in sensor and signalling technologies enable the phenomenological study of systems. The connection between sensor data and FEM is restricted to solving inverse problems placing unwarranted faith in the fidelity of the mathematical description of the system. If one concedes mis-specification between generative reality and the FEM then a framework to systematically characterise this uncertainty is required. This talk will present a statistical construction of the FEM which systematically blends mathematical description with observations.

Speaker: Mark Girolami

Mark Girolami is the Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering (1965) within the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge where he also holds the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Data Centric Engineering. In this role he will provide academic leadership for the Centre for Digital Built Britain across the University and more broadly throughout the national and international research communities. Prior to joining the University of Cambridge he held the Chair of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London.

He was one of the original founding Executive Directors of the Alan Turing Institute the UK’s national institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, after which he was appointed as Strategic Programme Director at Turing, where he established and continues to lead the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Programme on Data Centric Engineering.

Professor Girolami is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow (2007-2012), an EPSRC Established Career Research Fellow (2012-2018), and a recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.