Haghighi to be featured at SparkTalks on Jan. 23
MIE Assistant Professor Azadeh Haghighi will be one of the featured speakers during SparkTalks on Jan. 23 from 1:30 to 4:45 pm in the Thompson Rooms at the Student Center West, 828 S. Wolcott Ave., Chicago.
SparkTalks is UIC’s take on faculty lightning talks and provides an opportunity for faculty, leaders, and others across the campus to learn about the exciting activity happening in every corner of UIC. Through this exciting new series, UIC is igniting the thoughts and solutions of influential UIC changemakers to inspire and create a better world and fostering collaboration and idea exchange among faculty members across all colleges.
Haghighi will present a three-minute talk titled “New Era of In-Space Manufacturing: When Artificial Intelligence Meets Physics.”
The talk will focus on how to advance in-space manufacturing and assembly, which are vital to NASA’s long-term exploration goals, especially for the Moon and Mars missions.
“Deploying advanced manufacturing technologies integrating additive manufacturing, welding, and robotics in space enables the manufacturing, assembly, and repair of structures, reducing logistical burdens and supply needs from Earth,” she said.
During the talk, she will touch on how the unique challenges and extreme conditions of space — such as high thermal variations, microgravity and vacuum — require novel manufacturing techniques and computational tools to ensure reliability, repeatability, safety and structural integrity.
“Traditional computational tools for modeling manufacturing processes based on numerical models are too time-intensive for real-time applications and are unable to fully capture the complexities of dynamic manufacturing conditions, while in-space or simulated space experiments, like parabolic flights, are costly and yield limited data, slowing the development of accurate data-driven models,” Haghighi said.
Haghighi and her team in the Smarture Lab at UIC are advancing manufacturing technologies for extreme conditions and computational tools that merge physics-based insights with machine learning to create highly accurate models and digital twins. These innovations enable the fabrication of high-quality components across scales — from microelectronics to large habitats constructed by robotic teams on Mars and the Moon — designed to meet the demands of critical applications and extreme environments, such as space and aerospace, where data is inherently scarce and costly to obtain.
To attend, RSVP at SparkTalks.