Mechanical engineer Siyuan Chen PhD’۱۸ is on a query for “the holy grail of geology”—the ability to reliably envision earthquakes. The energy to envision seismic activity is a prolonged fugitive dream for geoscientists; even a few some-more mins or seconds of warning could vastly commission communities around a universe to ready for a onset.
“This work could potentially save millions of lives,” pronounced Chen, a PhD claimant in Professor Hod Lipson’s Creative Machines Lab.
Chen, who grew adult in Shanghai and attended China’s Tongji University, came to Columbia in 2013 to extend his studies in automotive engineering to other kinds of machines and applications. He started off building robots, though shortly shifted to an algorithmic approach, regulating information to develop designs. With Lipson, he is utilizing appurtenance training to map out a causality networks and stochastic processes of tectonic plates as a formidable energetic quivering system, formulating synthetic comprehension increasingly means to brand and consider signs of imminent quakes.
Chen has taken on other desirous data-driven projects in a Creative Machines Lab, too, from attempting to systematise tellurian thoughts by reading mind signals to regulating evolutionary algorithms to copy soothing robots ever some-more optimized for tasks like crawling. He also worked with Professor Sunil Agrawal’s Robotics and Rehabilitation Lab to build a cable-driven arm exoskeleton drudge (CAREX) to assist with neural reconstruction during NYU Langone Medical Center. The record uses a information mining technique to investigate electromyography information and regulate treatment.
Outside of a lab, Chen is cofounder of Trade Terminal Inc., a pioneering crypto-quantitative sidestep account that has outperformed even a thespian arise in a cryptocurrency zone in new years. And, he has served as a clamp boss of a Columbia University Chinese Students and Scholars Association, assisting classify gatherings of thinkers and leaders on campus.
But it is a guarantee of expecting earthquakes—and lenient communities to strengthen themselves—in that Chen has found a calling. After receiving his PhD this spring, he skeleton to continue operative to improved envision earth-shaking events.
“It isn’t so most my dream pursuit as my dream mission,” Chen said. “This is too large not to be explored.”
—by Jesse Adams
