Aalto University

Aalto University (Aalto), is a Finnish multidisciplinary university in the fields of science and technology, economics, architecture, and art and design. Aalto was founded in 2010 by merging three Finnish universities: The Helsinki School of Economics, The University of Art and Design Helsinki, and Helsinki University of Technology. Aalto is highly equipped with high-end cluster-computer and storage facilities for HPC and modeling, and large-scale data-handling and data-mining purposes, suitable for training large-scale ML models. Aalto hosts the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI), which is a nation-wide competence center for AI in Finland, initiated by Aalto, University of Helsinki, and VTT. In 2019 FCAI gained the Academy of Finland flagship status. FCAI hosts one of the units of European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), the ELLIS Unit Helsinki. In this project, Aalto is a key partner for the AI/ML technologies and is the leader of WP7 and WP8 in close collaboration with the other modeling partners (VTT, TU Wien, KTH) as well as with the EPFL-CECAM to share the AI-driven models in EESSI.

Role in the project

Aalto is involved in WP7 and WP8, developing AI-based surrogate models for wood microstructure models, and extending the methodology to couple the models with experimental data, optimisation, and integration with physics. The work includes adaptation of the modelling frameworks developed in WP1 and WP2 to allow for automated large-scale training data generation. The surrogate models are trained using widely available ML libraries such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. Bulding on those results, Aalto further adapts surrogate models to integrate them with the underlying physics, which is known as physics-informed machine learning. The methods and tools for optimisation of material properties are also developed. All the tools developed by Aalto are published as open source.