With the relative easing of pandemic travel restrictions in recent months, the DRIVEN partners have been able to implement several successful student and staff exchanges.
Student Exchanges
The University of Luxembourg (UL) has been developing and using a software called FEniCS for numerical simulations. On the other hand, INRIA uses SOFA, another software for numerical simulations. After Arnaud Mazier (UL) presented his research work on FEniCS during SOFA week 2021, he visited INRIA in December 2021 and discussed with Sidaty El hadramy on the development of a SOFA plugin to enable to use FEniCS for creating new material models in SOFA for surgical simulation. The collaboration is expected to result in an open-access plugin and a scientific paper.
INRIA’s PhD student Alban Odot has been co-supervised by Stéphane Cotin (INRIA) and Stéphane Bordas (UL). His PhD is focused on developing ways to speed up / improve Finite Element methods using Deep learning. In December 2021, he took the opportunity to visit UL. Also, within the framework of Bordas’ seminars on machine learning, Alban presented a seminar entitled Deformation approximation: Improve your Artificial Neural Network training using the Finite Element Method formulation. A case for static deformations.
UL’s PhD student Saurabh Deshpande is undertaking research towards the development of data-centric numerical models to simulate soft tissue deformations in real-time. As part of his research training, he visited INRIA’s labs during March 2022.
Staff Exchanges
Dr. Jack Hale, Dr. Michal Habera and Prof. Andreas Zilian visited UT Austin in March 2022 where they held extensive scientific discussions with researchers.
Collaborating closely with Dr. Christian Goodbrake and Prof. Michael Sacks at UT Austin, UL has implemented an automatically differentiable eigenvalue / eigenvector decomposition in the FEniCS Project allowing to implement their new structural tissue model.
Berta Rato, Dr. Lars Beex and Dr. Marco Magliulo visited University of Limerick in March 2022 where they met many of the university’s research support staff.