By Geraint Jones
Cal Tech Cahill Centre for Astrophysics and Astronomy
Following their attendance with other Engineering Nonlinearity project members at the IMAC-XXXV conference in Orange County, California in late January / early February 2017, Keith Worden, Nikos Dervilis and Ramon Fuentes set off on a road trip to neighbouring Pasadena, to attend a two-day Workshop at Cal Tech, hosted at the Cahill Centre for Astrophysics and Astronomy.
The workshop was entitled ‘Making Rational Decisions Under Uncertainty and Model Complexity’, and was dedicated to honouring the career and achievements of Professor Jim Beck, one of the leading lights in the international structural dynamics community and a pioneer of Bayesian statistical methods in linear and nonlinear system identification. Jim has made seminal contributions to dynamics, risk analysis and earthquake engineering (among other areas) and the meeting reflected this.
Keith gave an invited talk on ‘Nonlinear System Identification: From Least-Squares to ABC’, which was received kindly.