Ming Chen

Artificial Intelligence Meets Physics

Abstract:

In recent years, artificial-intelligence (AI) methodologies have been developed for a broad range of scientific applications, including molecular and materials property prediction, protein structure determination, drug discovery, and materials design. These AI-for-science approaches primarily leverage the strong expressivity of deep neural networks together with the massive volumes of experimental and computational data accumulated over decades. Despite the impressive preliminary successes of these models, major challenges remain. In particular, achieving data efficiency, ensuring physical consistency, and enabling reliable extrapolation to regimes not represented in the training data remain open questions. Incorporating physics into AI models represents a promising strategy to address these challenges. In this lecture, I will focus on three complementary directions through which physics can be integrated into AI to enhance accuracy, interpretability, and transferability.

Speaker: Ming Chen, Purdue University

Dr. Ming Chen received his B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University (2008) and his Ph.D. from New York University (2016), where he developed enhanced sampling methods for classical molecular dynamics simulations. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before joining Purdue University as an Assistant Professor in 2021. Dr. Chen’s research integrates physics-based modeling and machine learning to understand and predict molecular and materials behavior. His group develops physics-guided deep generative models for protein conformations, enhanced-sampling frameworks for exploring complex energy surfaces, and stochastic electronic-structure methods for large-scale ab initio simulations. Recent efforts also explore strong light–matter coupling and its effects on molecular thermodynamics. He has been awarded the 2023 NSF CSEDI and the ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award.  

Seminars start at 4:00 pm, and refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm. All seminars are held in the 2136 Physical Sciences Complex (#415) unless otherwise noted.