Oden delivers the Ted Belytschko Lecture at Northwestern

ICES Director J. Tinsley Oden delivered the Ted Belytschko Lecture at Northwestern University Oct. 13.

His lecture, “Predictability of Coarse-Grain Models of Atomistic Systems in the Presence of Uncertainty,” addressed the general questions of selection, calibration, validation, and uncertainty quantification in multiscale models of atomistic systems. He presented a Bayesian framework and described new algorithms for coarse-grained model selection and validation. Oden discussed the concepts of model plausibility, model evidence, entropy-based priors, parameter sensitivities, and an adaptive algorithm designed around an interpretation of Occam’s Razor, together with applications to typical atomistic systems in thermodynamic equilibrium.

Established in 2013, the Ted Belytschko Lecture recognizes Belytschko for his contributions to the field of computational structural mechanics. A member of Northwestern’s faculty since 1977, Belytschko’s interests were in the development of computational methods including explicit finite element methods that are widely used in crashworthiness analysis.