ESE Spring Seminar – “Physics-inspired Machine Learning”

Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Combining physics with machine learning is a rapidly growing field of research. Thereby, most work focuses on leveraging machine learning methods to solve problems in physics. Here, however, we focus on the converse, i.e., physics-inspired machine learning, which can be described as incorporating structure from physical systems into machine learning methods to obtain models with […]

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Computational imaging and multiomic biomarkers for precision medicine: characterizing heterogeneity in lung cancer” (Apurva Singh)

Class of 62 Auditorium, John Morgan Building 3620 Hamilton Walk, Philadelphia, PA

The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Despina Kontos are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Apurva Singh. Title:  "Computational imaging and multiomic biomarkers for precision medicine: characterizing heterogeneity in lung cancer" Date: February 12, 2024 Time: 1:00 PM Location:  John Morgan Building, Class of 62 auditorium Zoom link The public is […]

MEAM Seminar: “AI for Antibiotic Discovery”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Computers can be programmed for superhuman pattern recognition of images and text; however, their application in biology and medicine is still in its infancy. In this talk, I will discuss our advances over the past half-decade, which are accelerating discoveries in the crucial and underinvested area of antibiotic discovery. We developed the first antibiotic designed […]

ESE & CIS Spring Seminar – “Beyond the black box: characterizing and improving how neural networks learn”

Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The predominant paradigm in deep learning practice treats neural networks as "black boxes". This leads to economic and environmental costs as brute-force scaling remains the performance driver, and to safety issues as robust reasoning and alignment remain challenging. My research opens up the neural network black box with mathematical and statistical analyses of how networks […]

ASSET Seminar: “Enforcing Right to Explanation: Algorithmic Challenges and Opportunities” (Himabindu Lakkaraju, Harvard University)

Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

ABSTRACT: As predictive and generative models are increasingly being deployed in various high-stakes applications in critical domains including healthcare, law, policy and finance, it becomes important to ensure that relevant stakeholders understand the behaviors and outputs of these models so that they can determine if and when to intervene. To this end, several techniques have […]

Spring 2024 GRASP SFI: Fei Miao, University of Connecticut, “Learning and Control for Safety, Efficiency, and Resiliency of Embodied AI”

Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT With rapid evolution of sensing, communication, and computation, integrating learning and control presents significant Embodied AI opportunities. However, current decision-making frameworks lack comprehensive understanding of the tridirectional relationship among communication, learning and control, posing challenges for multi-agent […]

CBE Seminar: “Systems Engineering for Addressing Critical Challenges in Viral Vector Manufacturing” (Francesco Destro, MIT)

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Abstract The demand for viral vectors is poised to soon exceed current production capacities, driven by the surging number of clinical trials for gene and cell therapies. Unfortunately, current manufacturing processes for viral vectors have high costs and low titers. This talk will demonstrate how process systems engineering tools can be leveraged for addressing the […]

ESE Spring Seminar – “White-Box Computational Imaging: Measurements to Images to Insights”

Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Computation and machine learning hold tremendous potential to improve the quality and capabilities of imaging methods used across science, medicine, engineering, and art. Despite their impressive performance on benchmark datasets, however, deep learning methods are known to behave unpredictably on some real-world data, which limits their trusted adoption in safety-critical domains. Accordingly, in this talk […]

BE Seminar: “Where Do Therapeutic Antibodies Go?: A First-In-Human Journey” (Guolan Lu, Stanford)

Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Dr. Lu will introduce a fluorescence molecular imaging method to track therapeutic antibody delivery from cancer patients in vivo, down to single cells, through first-in-human clinical trials. She will present a new experimental and AI-powered analytical framework that integrates single-cell drug imaging with spatial omics to decipher drug-target-microenvironment in situ. This work establishes a foundational […]

CIS Seminar: “Accessible Foundation Models: Systems, Algorithms, and Science”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The ever-increasing scale of foundation models, such as ChatGPT and AlphaFold, has revolutionized AI and science more generally. However, increasing scale also steadily raises computational barriers, blocking almost everyone from studying, adapting, or otherwise using these models for anything beyond static API queries. In this talk, I will present research that significantly lowers these barriers […]