Honorary Argyris Lecture: Serkan Gugercin

We are happy to welcoming you on site for the public Honorary Argyris Lecture of Serkan Gugercin. Once a year, we award an Argyris Visiting Professorship to a leading personality in the field of simulation technology. With this award, we honor internationally renowned scientists from Germany and abroad, who are outstanding representatives of their disciplines in the field of simulation technology.

Modeling dynamical systems from data: A systems-theoretic perspective

Dynamical systems are a principal tool in the modeling, prediction, and control of physical phenomena with applications ranging from structural health monitoring to electrical power network dynamics, from heat dissipation in complex microelectronic devices  to vibration suppression in large wind turbines. Direct numerical simulation of these mathematical models may be the only possibility for accurate prediction or control of such complex phenomena.  However, in many instances, a high-fidelity mathematical model describing the dynamics is not readily available. Instead, one has access to an abundant amount of input/output data via either experimental measurements or a black-box simulation. The goal of data-driven modeling is, then, to accurately model the underlying dynamics using input/output data only.

In this talk, we will investigate various approaches to data-driven modeling of dynamical systems using systems-theoretical concepts. We will consider both frequency-domain and time-domain measurements of a dynamical system. In some instances we will have true experimental data, and in others we will have access to simulation data. We will illustrate these concepts in various examples ranging from structural dynamics to electrical power networks to microelectromechanical systems.

Serkan Gugercin

Serkan Gugercin is a professor of Mathematics at Virginia Tech. He holds the Class of 1950 Professorship. He is also a core faculty member and a Deputy Director in the Division of Computational Modeling and Data Analytics. In 1992, he received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey; and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rice University, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. His primary research interests are model reduction, data-driven modeling, numerical linear algebra, approximation theory, and systems and control theory. Dr. Gugercin received the Ralph Budd Award for Research in Engineering from Rice University in 2003 for the best doctoral thesis in the School of Engineering; Teaching Award from Jacobs University Bremen, in 2003; the National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award in Computational and Applied Mathematics in 2007; and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2016.