Abstract: Industrial software is the weakest component in the entire Chinese industrial system. Its research and application in China lag far behind those in developed Western countries, with over 80% of key industrial software reliant on imports. It is currently a critical technology that has challenged scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations in this country, particularly with the new wave of generative AI models represented by GPT and Sora, which are leading the trend of digital transformation and intelligent development. The profound and widespread changes brought by the era of artificial intelligence, from fundamental scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations to the reshaping of social structures, and from shifts in economic forms to nuances in people's daily lives, are ubiquitous. However, the research and application of industrial software, especially intelligent large models, face significant challenges such as data scarcity, massive computational power demands, heterogeneous storage, and interpretability. This presentation will address the status, challenges, and advancements of industrial software, data-driven machine learning, integration of physics- and data-driven machine learning, and AI large models. It will focus on the numerical reservoir simulation software and the dual-driven (physics and data) intelligent large model developed by the presenter’s research team: the Gaia large model.  

Bio: Dr. Zhangxing (John) Chen has the rare distinction of simultaneously holding multiple research chairs at Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China and University of Calgary, Canada. Dr. Chen’s exceptional contributions to science and engineering research, practice, and education have been recognized by numerous highest professional distinctions, such as Member of National Academy of Engineering, USA and Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Canadian Academy of Engineering and Engineering Institute of Canada, and by numerous most prestigious awards, such as the Friendship Medal of The People’s Republic of China, SPE’s Technical Excellence and Achievements Award, NSERC’s (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Synergy Award for Innovation, Fields-CAIMS (Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society) Prize, Killam Professorship Award, IBM Faculty Award, Imperial Oil Research Award, Alberta Science and Technology Outstanding Leader Award, and Gerald J. Ford Research Award. Dr. Chen has authored/co-authored 24 books, published over 1,300 research articles, delivered over 550 invited, keynote and plenary talks, and owned 54 patents. According to Elsevier Scopus, his publications have been ranked #1 in terms of the overall scholarship (numbers of papers, citations, and H-index) in reservoir simulation in the world. His research interests are Artificial Intelligence, Reservoir Engineering, Reservoir Simulation and Hydrogen Production.