The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites all to a colloquium featuring Dr. Kieron Burke, Departments of Physics and of Chemistry, UC Irvine. Dr. Burke will present his talk, “Density functional theory and machine learning”, Tuesday, Nov. 29, at 4:10 p.m. in Webster 17.
Meet for refreshments before the lecture at 3:45 – 4:10 p.m. in the foyer on floor G above the lecture hall.
Abstract: Last year, more than 30,000 scientific papers used density functional theory (DFT). This colloquium will be a broad overview of the modern field of DFT calculations, for researchers of all backgrounds. I will explain what it is, how it works, and where it fails. I will then discuss how machine learning is being applied to many areas of materials and chemical sciences, and how I hope it does better at finding density functionals than it does at recommending movies. Useful background can be found in “DFT in a nutshell” or “Perspective on DFT”.
