Chief Scientist of The Alan Turing Institute Delivers a Seminar at Archimedes
Mark Girolami, the Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Chief Scientist of The Alan Turing Institute in London, UK, delivered a seminar at the Archimedes Amphitheatre on Friday, 7 November 2025.
Besides being a Professor at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Christ's College, Professor Girolami also holds the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Data-Centric Engineering at Cambridge, and leads the Data-Centric Engineering (DCE) program at The Alan Turing Institute. This is a program which focuses on critical infrastructure and the use of sensors and AI to monitor the health of assets. It also addresses data science, machine learning, and AI applications in the marine and maritime industries, energy systems, and innovative research at the intersection of humanities and engineering. Before becoming part of the University of Cambridge, Professor Girolami held the Chair of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London, UK.
It is worth mentioning that The Alan Turing Institute is the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, and Mark Girolami's visit and seminar presentation are considered a significant honor for the Archimedes Unit and the Athena Research Center in Greece.
During his seminar, the Chief Scientist spoke about the finite element method (FEM), which he described as "one of the great triumphs of applied mathematics, numerical analysis and software development." He discussed recent developments in sensor and signaling technologies that enable the phenomenological study of complex natural and physical systems. Finally, he presented a statistical construction of the finite element method (FEM) that, he argued, systematically blends mathematical description with data observations by endowing the Hilbert space of FEM solutions with the additional structure of a Probability Measure
