Guest Lecture on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Applications in Chemical Engineering

A webinar on “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Applications in Chemical Engineering”was organized by Department of Chemical Engineering, MVJCEon 08.05.2021 from 2.00 pm to 3.30 pmthrough online mode and the session was conducted in Webex platform. The Guest Speaker for the event was Dr. Ravindra D Gudi, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Bombay.The webinar was attended by 120 participants from inside (faculty and students) and outside MVJCE.

About the Speaker

Dr. Ravindra D. Gudi is currently working as Professor-in-Charge in IIT Bombay Research Park Foundation. He has served as Head at Department of Chemical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and as the Professor-in-Charge of Continuing Education and QIP. He also holds the Institute Chair positionin Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Dr. Gudi has served as Visiting Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada (1997); at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003-04); and at the EECE Department of Washington University in St. Louis (2015).

He secured his B-Tech and M-Tech degrees from IIT Bombay and PhD from the University of Alberta (1995). His research interests lie, broadly, in Process Systems Engineering and Green Engineering, i. e. modeling, optimization, control and fault diagnosis of process systems, and sustainability in industrial practices.Dr. Gudi has published over 135 Scopus indexed papers and has 9 US patents to his creditin various areas of Process Systems Engineering. He has guided over 60 PhD and M.Tech. students in their researchat IIT Bombay.

Dr. Gudi is a recipient of several awards including the Canadian Commonwealth Fellowship by the Government of Canada (1991-1995), Lovraj Kumar Memorial Award for promotion of Industry Academia Interaction, (July 1998 - January 1999), Manudhane Applied Research Award (2006) and Herdillia Award for Excellence in Basic Chemical Engineering (2009). He is an Associate Editor of the IFAC journal of Process Control, and Guest Editor of Control Engineering Practice. He serves on several technical committees of IFAC and is currently a member of IFAC council. He is an active consultant for many industries including both in India and abroad. He is also currently serving as the President of the Automatic Control and Dynamic Optimization Society of India.

A Brief Account of the Lecture

The session started with the welcome address by Dr. Mahabaleswarappa, Principal, MVJCE for the online audience and the guest speaker. He emphasized the necessity of the webinar session with significance on AI and ML in Chemical Engineering.

Webinar has started with a discussion on whether AI is Artificial or Augmented Intelligence, and the prevailing importance of Artificial Intelligence in Chemical Engineeringin the current scenario. The Guest Speaker gave an insight on the role played by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Chemical Engineering Applications. A major shortcoming of adopting traditional strategies is the fact that solving Chemical Engineering problems is often impossible and very difficult, due to the highly nonlinear behavior of chemical processes. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are becoming useful due to their simple implementation, easy designing, generality, robustness and flexibility. The AI includes various branches, namely artificial neural network, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithm, expert systems and hybrid systems. They have been widely used in various applications of the Chemical Engineering field, including modelling, process control, classification, fault detection and diagnosis.

The Speaker stressed on the importance of developing advanced technology for enhancing performance in the Chemical industry utilizing AI and ML. He has discussed interesting topics such as basics of AI, combustion (Sensor diversity), digitalization, data generation in a typical product lifecycle, multivariate monitoring, explicit discrimination via supervised learning/scaling and clustering. The speaker has demonstrated the experimental data, highlighting the necessity of advanced research in AI and ML which emphasized the curiosityamong the participants. Finally, the speaker concluded the presentationby elaborating the present research scenario.

After the presentation, Q&A session was conductedwhere the Speaker addressed the queries of attendeesposted in thechat box in the Cisco WebEx platform during the webinar session.

The webinar session concluded with vote of thanks to the MVJ management, Principal, COE and Vice principal of MVJCEfor providing this opportunity to gain knowledge on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Chemical Engineering. The event organizers are grateful to Guest Speaker Dr. Ravindra D. Gudi for delivering informative and impressive aspects of AI and ML in Chemical Engineering applications and motivating the interested young generations to switch to this new domain. A special mention to ITHELPDESK and team for their technical support during the online session.

Outcome of the Event

The webinar enabled the attendees to strengthen their knowledge about the role of AI and ML in Chemical Engineering. Artificial neural networks exhibit several features that make them attractive for fault detection and diagnosisin complex systems. The session has introduced the computational means and methodologies available to enable computers to perform intelligent engineering tasks. The attendees were gifted with information and knowledge about industry needs, latest technical appraisals and research areas related to this field.

Mr. Samraj S
Webinar Organizer
Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering