WKU News

Jacob Walterman, the Wolfram Ambassador and the President of SIAM Student Chapter of WKU, has presented research funded by the Kentucky NSF EPSCoR KAMPERS (National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research Kentucky Advanced Manufacturing Partnership for Enhanced Robotics and Structures) project. Walterman is an undergraduate student majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science.

Walterman’s poster presentation with the title “Wolfram Demonstrations to Simulate Boundary Stabilization/Control of Certain Linear Partial Differential Equations” is presented at the AMS - PME Undergraduate Student Poster Sessions of the largest mathematics gathering in the world, Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM), whose main organizer is the American Mathematical Society. This year, 277 posters across the world were eligible to make it to the poster session. His results are a continuation of a series of work of Dr. Ozer’s research group. Jacob’s findings shed light on the robust model reductions of certain wave and beam equations. These “mathematically rigorous” reduced models accurately predict feedback-controlled vibrations on piezoelectric beams via the collocated controller/sensor at the tip of the beam. Our results substantially improve the knowledge of how to accurately control critical elastic components of control systems. Also, this will spark undergraduate research interest in numerical modeling and optimal control. Walterman’s mathematical simulations are converted to the computational framework, Wolfram’s Computable Document Format (CDF), to be published at open-source-code website called Wolfram Demonstrations Projects (WDP). Since each demonstration project is peer-reviewed and edited by Wolfram experts and engineers for content, clarity, presentation, quality, and reliability, one of the broader impacts of the project to spread the “right” data sets and algorithms to the scientific community is accomplished this way. Some of the simulations can be viewed here.

From the interactions at the poster session, Walterman's enthusiasm and the level of professionalism were also captured by Dr. Ozer and attendees. A referee of his poster commented, “The presentation was well done. The enthusiasm was infectious. The technical details were presented well. The poster came with a demo (code running on a computer). The results included in the study were reproducible (code available to the public through the Wolfram Projects Interface; easy to modify and play around). These are exceptional features. Very well done.”

Walterman is currently co-authoring a paper with Ahmet Kaan Aydin, the WKU’s John D. Minton awardee of 2022, to be submitted to the IEEE Proceedings in March. The paper is about the robust sensor design for smart laminates with arbitrary number of layers where the coupling of different dynamics makes the algorithm much more complicated.

Walterman as the Wolfram Ambassador of WKU, Ahmet, and Dr. Ozer as the faculty advisor, had an informal meeting with Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research. Wolfram is one of the world's most respected computer, web, and cloud software companies — as well as a powerhouse of scientific and technical innovation. Their discussion centered around Wolfram’s Demonstrations’ peer-revision process. Walterman pointed out the bugs at the mobile displays of simulations. Finally, at the request of Walterman, Wolfram company will help the group organize several coding bootcamps at WKU. They plan to invite several Wolfram engineers to help conduct the workshop with Walterman. This will hopefully spark undergraduate student involvement in coding projects in applied mathematics and engineering.