{"690246":{"#nid":"690246","#data":{"type":"event","title":"Ph.D. Dissertation Defense - Niyem Mawenbe Bawana","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ETitle\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cem\u003E:\u0026nbsp; Deep Learning for Terahertz Damage Characterization in Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer Laminates: From Detection to Quantification\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ECommittee:\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr.\u0026nbsp;David Citrin, ECE, Chair, Advisor\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr.\u0026nbsp;David Anderson, ECE\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr.\u0026nbsp;Ryan Sherman, CEE\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr.\u0026nbsp;Doug Yoder, ECE\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr.\u0026nbsp;Nico Declercq, ME\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EGlass-fibre reinforced polymer laminates are deployed at scale across aerospace, transportation,\u003Cbr\u003Eenergy, and pressure-vessel applications, yet remain vulnerable to barely-visible impact damage\u003Cbr\u003E(BVID) that compromises internal load paths while leaving minimal surface evidence. Terahertz\u003Cbr\u003E(THz) time-of-flight imaging offers a non-contact, non-ionizing, depth-resolved probe, but its\u003Cbr\u003Edeployment is limited by complex B-scans, expert-interpretation overhead, and the annotation cost\u003Cbr\u003Eof supervised learning. This dissertation develops physics-informed deep-learning pipelines that turn\u003Cbr\u003Ehigh-dimensional THz measurements into reliable, interpretable, and scalable inspection decisions\u003Cbr\u003Ewhile reducing the manual labelling and destructive supervision required to build them. Two\u003Cbr\u003Esynthetic corpora are produced: 1,071 BVID specimens generated by coupling Abaqus low-velocity\u003Cbr\u003Eimpact simulations to a 1D MEEP THz forward model; and 1,205 parametric Teflon-insert specimens\u003Cbr\u003Efrom MEEP alone. A transfer-learned DenseNet-121 classifier achieves 0.991 accuracy on a held-out\u003Cbr\u003Eexperimental cohort. A modality-agnostic Abaqus\u2013MEEP-pretrained weakly supervised pipeline\u003Cbr\u003Econverts gradient-based saliency into calibrated bounding boxes and a continuous severity output\u003Cbr\u003E(R2 = 0.81 on the synthetic test split), transferring without modification between THz and X-ray\u003Cbr\u003Emicro-computed tomography data, where a YOLOv8 student detector reaches mAP@50 \u2248 0.99.\u003Cbr\u003EA three-tier multi-task network coupled to a calibrated physics-based interface predictor jointly\u003Cbr\u003Eregresses defect presence, interface index, ply count, defect thickness (\u223c 30 \u00b5m MAE) and diameter,\u003Cbr\u003Elifting depth accuracy from \u223c 14% to 91.6%, and transferring to an external experimental benchmark\u003Cbr\u003Ewith front-surface normalization alone.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Deep Learning for Terahertz Damage Characterization in Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer Laminates: From Detection to Quantification "}],"uid":"28475","created_gmt":"2026-05-12 21:46:54","changed_gmt":"2026-05-12 21:48:10","author":"Daniela Staiculescu","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2026-06-03T09:00:00-04:00","event_time_end":"2026-06-03T11:00:00-04:00","event_time_end_last":"2026-06-03T11:00:00-04:00","gmt_time_start":"2026-06-03 13:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2026-06-03 15:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2026-06-03 15:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"location":"Online","extras":[],"related_links":[{"url":"https:\/\/teams.microsoft.com\/meet\/251359073936634?p=yzKFE2djjU5Lmc4Sip","title":"Microsoft Teams Link "}],"groups":[{"id":"434381","name":"ECE Ph.D. Dissertation Defenses"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"100811","name":"Phd Defense"},{"id":"1808","name":"graduate students"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1788","name":"Other\/Miscellaneous"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78771","name":"Public"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}