New technologies are changing the way we think about designing and operating future aerospace systems. In particular, the combination of sensing technologies and computational power brings new opportunities for data-driven modeling and data-driven decision-making. Yet data alone cannot deliver the levels of predictive confidence and modeling reliability demanded for aerospace systems. For that, we must build on the decades of progress in rigorous physics-based modeling and associated uncertainty quantification. This talk discusses our work at the intersection of physics-based and data-driven modeling, with a focus on the design of next-generation aircraft. We show how adaptive reduced models combined with machine learning enable dynamic decision-making onboard a structural-condition-aware UAV. We show how multi-fidelity formulations exploit a rich set of information sources to achieve multidisciplinary design under uncertainty for future aircraft concepts.

About the speaker...
Karen E. Willcox is Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and formerly the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She has served on the faculty at MIT for 16 years. Prior to that, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. Her research at MIT has produced scalable computational methods for design of next-generation engineered systems, with a particular focus on model reduction as a way to learn principled approximations from data and on multi-fidelity formulations to leverage multiple sources of uncertain information. These methods are widely applied in aircraft system design and environmental policy decision-making. In addition to her research pursuits, Willcox is active in education innovation. She served as co-Chair of the MIT Online Education Policy Initiative and co-Chair of the 2013-2014 Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education. She is a recognized innovator in the U.S. education landscape, where she is a 2015 recipient of the First in the World Department of Education grant.