Applied Artificial Intelligence

Dr William Sayers is currently conducting research on Physical Systems Modelling with Artificial Intelligence, this area of research investigates the optimisation of physical engineering systems, using multi-objective optimisation techniques.

Due to the computing demands of modelling these systems, artificial intelligence based meta-models show promise in estimating the model results.

This requires modifying multi-objective optimisation techniques to include the use of a pre-trained and online-trained deep neural network based discriminator, which will classify engineering models as promising, or non-promising. The promising models can then be evaluated fully, thus ensuring that compute power is focused on models with good potential.

Effectively, the artificial intelligence models learn what aspects of a model are promising, and allow the optimisation algorithm to make “leaps of intuition” where exploration yields new promising model setups. Initial results, based around flood risk reduction and water distribution system reliability, have shown very promising results.

He is also working with Dr Hassan Chizari from UOG on his project generating strong cryptographic keys, as well as on several KTP bids with Professor Shujun Zhang​.