Advances in computational design and manufacturing (CDaM) have already permeated and transformed numerous industries, including aerospace, architecture, electronics, dental, and digital media, among others. Nevertheless, the full potential of the CDaM workflow is still limited by a number of barriers, such as the extensive domainspecific knowledge that is often required to use CDaM software packages or integrate CDaM solutions into existing workflows. Generative AI tools such as Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to remove these barriers, by expediting the CDaM process and providing an intuitive, unified, and user-friendly interface that connects each stage of the pipeline. However, to date, generative AI and LLMs have predominantly been applied to non-engineering domains. In this study, we show how these tools can also be used to develop new design and manufacturing workflows.

Tactile sensing is critical for humans to perform everyday tasks. While significant progress has been made in analyzing object grasping from vision, it remains unclear how we can utilize tactile sensing to reason about and model the dynamics of hand-object interactions. In this work, we employ a high-resolution tactile glove to perform four different interactive activities on a diversified set of objects. We build our model on a cross-modal learning framework and generate the labels using a visual processing pipeline to supervise the tactile model, which can then be used on its own during the test time. The tactile model aims to predict the 3d locations of both the hand and the object purely from the touch data by combining a predictive model and a contrastive learning module. This framework can reason about the interaction patterns from the tactile data, hallucinate the changes in the environment, estimate the uncertainty of the prediction, and generalize to unseen objects. We also provide detailed ablation studies regarding different system designs as well as visualizations of the predicted trajectories. This work takes a step on dynamics modeling in hand-object interactions from dense tactile sensing, which opens the door for future applications in activity learning, human-computer interactions, and imitation learning for robotics.

We present AutoOED, an Optimal Experiment Design platform powered with automated machine learning to accelerate the discovery of optimal solutions. The platform solves multi-objective optimization problems in time- and data-efficient manner by automatically guiding the design of experiments to be evaluated. To automate the optimization process, we implement several multi-objective Bayesian optimization algorithms with state-of-the-art performance. AutoOED is open-source and written in Python. The codebase is modular, facilitating extensions and tailoring the code, serving as a testbed for machine learning researchers to easily develop and evaluate their own multi-objective Bayesian optimization algorithms. An intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) is provided to visualize and guide the experiments for users with little or no experience with coding, machine learning, or optimization. Furthermore, a distributed system is integrated to enable parallelized experimental evaluations by independent workers in remote locations. The platform is available at https://autooed.org.