The Future Needs Computational Science and Engineering

Professor Karen Willcox, Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, University of Texas at Austin discusses the role of computational science in the future of engineering and science.

Data Science. Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning. Across science and engineering, these terms are on the minds of academics and practitioners alike. Harnessing our growing amounts of data provides tremendous opportunities to drive solutions to some of society's most pressing challenges. But for many frontier science and engineering challenge problems, a purely data-focused perspective will fall short -- these problems are characterized by complex multi-scale multi-physics dynamics, high-dimensional uncertain parameters that cannot be observed directly, a relative sparsity of data, and a need to issue predictions in support of high-consequence decisions that go beyond the specific conditions where data may be available. Instead, a synergistic combination of data and predictive physics-based models is essential. This talk will discuss the critical role of Computational Science -- an interdisciplinary field that at its core involves mathematical models and simulations to understand physical and natural systems -- in a data-intensive future for engineering and science.

The recording is about 22 minutes long, and was presented at the 2020 Global Altair Technology conference.