Davide D'Angella grew up in a small Italian peninsula dividing the Venetian Lagoon from the Adriatic Sea. After his high-school graduation, being firmly convinced he did not want to study any longer, he worked a couple of years as a computer programmer. This experience made him eagerto deepen his theoretical understanding of the subject, giving him the motivation to continue his studies. He headed to the University of Milan, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in computer science. After a short Au Pair experience in Germany, he moved to Munich, where he got his master's degree in Computational Science and Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. Davide is now a research associate and Ph.D. candidate at the same university in the research group Simulation in Applied Mechanics at the chair of Computational Modeling and Simulation.

As a product of the "Mauerfall", Moritz Jokeit grew up in the non-existing town of Bielefeld and the alpine foothills near Rosenheim. Following his bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering, he studied Computational Mechanics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). His passion for deep learning and computational mechanics was transformed into a master thesis thatlaid the groundwork for this lecture book. After his graduation he continued his research at the Chair of Computational Modeling and Simulation. He is now a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Biomechanics at the ETH Zürich.

Leon Herrmann has a very diverse background, born in South Africa and growing up in seven different countries. He did his bachelor studies in Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and then continued his studies in Computational Mechanics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Additionally, being a part of the Bavarian Graduate School of Engineering (BGCE) provided him with important insights into the academic world, which he is very grateful for. His main study and research focus has been in finite element methods and the simulation of fracture in composite materials. He is now working in the field of artificial intelligence in computational mechanics.