Abstract: For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can now rigorously explore relationships that span across distinct areas – such as, mechanics and biology, or science and art – to deepen our understanding, to accelerate innovation, and to drive scientific discovery. However, many existing AI methods have limitations when it comes to physical intuition, and often hallucinate. To address these challenges, we present research that blurs the boundary between physics-based and data-driven modeling through a series of physics-inspired multimodal graph-based generative AI models, set forth in a hierarchical multi-agent mixture-of-experts framework. The design of these models follows a biologically inspired approach where we re-use neural structures and dynamically arrange them in different patterns and utility, implementing a manifestation of the universality-diversity-principle that forms a powerful principle in bioinspired materials. This new generation of models is applied to the analysis and design of materials, specifically to mimic and improve upon biological materials. Applied specifically to protein engineering, the talk will cover case studies covering distinct scales, from silk, to collagen, to biomineralized materials, as well as applications to medicine, food and agriculture where materials design is critical to achieve performance targets.

Bio: Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT. Professor Buehler pursues new modeling, design and manufacturing approaches for advanced bio-inspired materials that offer greater resilience and a wide range of controllable properties from the nano- to the macroscale. He received many distinguished awards, including the Feynman Prize, the ASME Drucker Medal, the J.R. Rice Medal, and many others. Buehler is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.