This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT The rise of recent Foundation models (and applications e.g. ChatGPT) offer an exciting glimpse into the capabilities of large deep networks trained on Internet-scale data. They hint at a possible blueprint for building generalist robot brains that can […]
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The physics of active matter, such as bacterial colonies and bird flocks, exhibiting interesting self-organizing dynamical behavior has gained considerable importance in recent years. Recent theoretical advances use techniques from hydrodynamics, kinetic theory, and non-equilibrium statistical physics. However, for biological agents, these don’t seem to recognize explicitly their critical feature, namely, the role of survival-driven […] |
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Genetic engineering of plants is at the core of sustainability efforts, natural product synthesis, and agricultural crop engineering. The plant cell wall is a barrier that limits the ease and throughput with which exogenous biomolecules can be delivered to plants. Current delivery methods either suffer from host range limitations, low transformation efficiencies, tissue regenerability, tissue […]
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Mucus is essential for life and serves as a barrier to hydrate, lubricate, and protect tissues. Mucin glycoproteins are the major component of mucus. There are 20+ mucin genes with variable expression patterns, splicing, and post-translational glycosylation that result in structures with discrete biochemical functions. Mucins play roles in infection, immunity, inflammation and cancer. Such […] |
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This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Dr. Rizzi will provide an overview of the recently established Boston Dynamics AI Institute and its developing research efforts. This will include a discussion of the motivation for developing highly capable dynamic robots, a brief history of […] |
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Recent progress in diverse disciplines such as soft matter physics, nanoparticle synthesis, nanomedicine, and microbiology has enabled rich opportunities for translation of small-scale robots into medical applications. These robotic systems are providing innovative, high-precision, therapeutic and diagnostic approaches for the treatment of diseases associated with microbial biofilms and are rapidly moving from proof-of-concept studies to […] |
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This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. This week's speaker will be virtual. ABSTRACT Morphological Computation is a concept in robotics that suggests that the morphology of a robot should play a crucial role in the design of intelligent machines. This is inspired by observations in […] |
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Humans have frequently looked to natural phenomena to inspire the design of art, structures, and mechanisms. However, there are as many different ways to learn from nature as there are words for this approach: bioinspiration, biomimicry, and biodesign to name a few. In this talk, I propose a taxonomy for categorizing distinct biodesign approaches and […]
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This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 512 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT In this talk, I will present research on building photorealistic avatars of humans wearing complex clothing in a data-driven manner. Such avatars will be a critical technology to enable future applications such as VR/AR and virtual content creation. […] |
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On small length-scales, the mechanics of soft materials may be dominated by their interfacial properties as opposed to their bulk properties. These effects are described by equilibrium models of elasto-capillarity and wetting. In these models, interfacial energies and bulk material properties are held constant. However, in biological materials, including living cells and tissues, these properties […] |
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It is of great interest for materials scientists to study wet biological adhesives as inspiration for synthetic adhesives that can perform well in wet conditions. A compelling example is given by the adhesive proteins secreted by marine mussels, which have inspired the development of synthetic polymer adhesives and coatings for adhesion to wet surfaces. Mussel […]
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Recent advances in CRISPR/Cas-based epigenome editing technologies have enabled programmable control over human gene expression, chromatin states, and genomic organization. Consequently, these emerging technologies have created new opportunities to engineer human cells for therapeutic benefit and catalyzed innovative ways to functionally interrogate gene regulatory mechanisms in situ. Toward these ends, we have recently developed new […] |
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This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT We, as robot engineers, have to think hard about our role in the design of robots and how it interacts with learning, both in "the factory" (that is, at engineering time) and in "the wild" (that is, […] |
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Flowing granular materials arise everywhere around us, in industry from pharmaceutical processes to bulk good transport lines, and in nature from snow avalanches to captivating dune fields. In landslides, we have an interesting interplay between microscale (grain-grain contacts) and macroscale processes (continuum behavior). In order to understand critical macroscale processes such as stability of a […] |
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This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT I will describe engineering (im)possibilities discovered with geometry or topology. These provide or revoke “hunting licenses” for the search of quantities of interest in three contexts: feedback control, applied Koopmanism, and deep neural network autoencoders. Control-Lyapunov or barrier […]
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Traditionally, the dynamic modeling of chemical processes has relied on first-principles models grounded in fundamental physics and chemistry laws. These models, primarily formulated through differential equations with constant parameters, enable the calculation of control actions optimizing process operations, taking both process and actuator limitations into account. However, the ever-evolving and nonlinear nature of chemical processes […] |
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Advances in hybrid and electric vehicle technologies combined with a demand for green initiatives have recently motivated necessary diversification in energy storage research. To achieve customer expectations for hybrid and electric vehicles, new battery systems with higher energy densities, power densities and cycle life than the current state-of-art Lithium (Li)-ion battery are needed. Further, to […] |
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This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Recent advances in robot materials and algorithms have enabled new levels of adaptive and versatile behavior. In this talk I will describe my lab’s efforts to create robots, mechanisms, and control algorithms capable of adaptive behaviors in […] |
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Aerial robotics have become ubiquitous, but (like most robots) they still struggle to operate at high speed in unstructured, cramped environments. By considering a vehicle's mechanical design simultaneously with the design of controls and automation algorithms, we have more degrees of freedoms to find creative solutions to problems. In this talk I will present some […] |
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This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Countless science fiction works have set our expectations for small, mobile, autonomous robots for use in a broad range of applications. The ability to move through highly dynamic and complex environments can expand capabilities in search and rescue […]
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The ability to modulate pathogenic proteins represents a powerful treatment strategy for diseases. Unfortunately, many proteins are considered "undruggable" by small molecules, and are often intrinsically disordered, precluding the usage of structure-based tools for binder design. To address these challenges, we have developed a suite of algorithms that enable the design of target-specific peptides via […] |
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In this talk we will discuss how to engineer the dispersion relation of photonic platforms to provide robust propagation of classical and quantum states of light. In the first part of this talk, we will unveil how to leverage the interaction of nonlinearity with higher orders of dispersion to create novel types of solitons, wave […] |
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This is a HYRBID event with a VIRTUAL SPEAKER. The GRASP on Robotics Seminar will be streamed for in-person attendees in Wu and Chen and virtual attendees may join the talk via Zoom. ABSTRACT Every team has top performers -- people who excel at working in a team to find the right solutions in complex, difficult […] |
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