Keynotes/Lectures
Riviera Resort & Spa Palm Springs, Palm Springs, CA | January 19-22, 2026
Professor Sankaran Mahadevan
Probabilistic Digital Twins for Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Decision-Making
DATE/TIME:
Monday, January 19, 2026 | 9:00 a.m.
ABSTRACT:
The digital twin paradigm integrates information obtained from sensor data, physics models, as well as operational and inspection/maintenance/repair history of a physical system or component of interest. As more and more data becomes available, the resulting updated model becomes increasingly accurate in predicting future behavior of the system, and can potentially be used to support several objectives, such as sustainment, mission planning, and operational maneuvers. This presentation will discuss recent advances in digital twin methodologies to support all three objectives, based on several types of computations: current state diagnosis, model updating, future state prognosis, and decision-making. All these computations are affected by uncertainty regarding system properties, operational parameters, usage and environment, as well as uncertainties in data and the prediction models. Therefore the presentation will address decision-making under uncertainty, and uncertainty quantification in diagnosis and prognosis, considering both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty sources. Scaling up the probabilistic digital twin methodology to support real-time decision-making is a challenge, and several strategies that combine recent advances in sensing, computing, data fusion, and machine learning to enable the scale-up will be discussed. Several use cases related to buildings, aircraft, marine vessels, and additive manufacturing will be presented.
Professor Sankaran Mahadevan (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA) has more than thirty-five years of research and teaching experience in uncertainty quantification, risk and reliability analysis, machine learning, structural health diagnosis and prognosis, and decision-making under uncertainty. He has applied these methods to a variety of...
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Prof. Malte Krack:
On Some of My Least Successful Research Efforts:
Uncovering the Dynamics of a Beam-Slider System
DATE/TIME:
Tuesday, January 20, 2026 | 11:20 a.m.
ABSTRACT:
This lecture addresses a harmonically-driven beam-slider system that shows intriguing dynamics. The system passively adapts itself as the slider slowly changes its position along the beam. With this, the system is able to reach and maintain large vibrations over a broad band of excitation frequencies, which is why the system attracted attention in the energy harvesting community. The repositioning of the slider relies on intricate forms of locomotion enabled by dry friction and free play nonlinearity. The broadband efficacy relies on nonlinear bending-stretching coupling of the doubly-clamped beam. The lecture comprises mathematical modeling, numerical simulation, experimental validation, and - perhaps most importantly - theoretical understanding of the different facets of the system's behavior. In what way my research efforts were unsuccessful will become clear during the lecture.
Malte Krack is Full Professor at the University of Stuttgart. After graduating 2014 from University of Hannover he was postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research revolves around nonlinear structural dynamics with particular focus on contact, spanning the range from fundamental method development to real...
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