Plenary Lecture 1

Room: Audimax
Time: Monday, 28. September 2026, 9:40 - 10:20
Chair: Michael Beer

Jie Li

Professor
State Key Laboratory of Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering & College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University, China

New Developments on Probability Density Evolution Theory

The randomness propagation in a physical system plays an important role in understanding behaviors of engineering systems, particularly those emerging in nonlinear dynamic systems. In this way, probability density evolution theory supplies a basic frame to capture the essential relationship between the change of physical state and the evolution of probability density of the system. In this lecture, a fundamental content of probability density evolution theory is presented, especially on its logic foundation: the principle of conservation of probability. Then a series of newly developments are summarized, including: (1) Finite-dimensional distributions of a stochastic process; (2) The joint probability density function of a high-dimensional nonlinear stochastic dynamical system; (3) Dimensionality reduction technology based on Manifold Learning; (4) The Probabilistic Inverse Problem and its Solving Method Based on Convex Optimization Algorithms; (5) Global Sensitivity analysis of stochastic systems. On these newly developments, the basic idea and basic framework of the Physical Stochastic System are particularly emphasized and summarized.

Short Bio

Prof. Jie Li is a Chair Professor in the Structural Engineering at Tongji University, the academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from Tongji University, China in 1988, and received an honorary doctorate in engineering science from Aalborg University, Denmark in 2013. Prof. Li has been devoted to the theoretical research on structural engineering over 40 years. His contributions are distributed in the area of damage mechanics and stochastic dynamics. Prof. Li is the author of more than 400 peer reviewed journal papers. In 2014, Prof. Li was awarded the Alfred M. Freudenthal Medal by ASCE, owing to his academic achievements in the probability density evolution method and in the seismic reliability-based design of large-scale infrastructure systems. From 2017 to 2022, Prof. Li served as the president of International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (IASSAR).