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BE Seminar: “A Task-Optimized Approach to Systems Neuroscience” (Aran Nayebi, MIT)

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

Note that this seminar will be held in Wu & Chen Auditorium (Levine 101). Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in complex environments, and it is unclear how the brain reformats dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. To gain traction on this problem, new recording paradigms now facilitate the ability to […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Computational Study on Rough Wall-Bounded Flows and their Effects at Low and Very-High Reynolds Numbers”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Many relevant engineering fluid dynamics problems, such as turbulent flow over an airplane or transport processes in geophysical flows, contain wall-bounded regions that form boundary layers. Oftentimes, numerical and experimental studies are simplified by using smooth surfaces.  This simplification has allowed us to gain a greater understanding of near-wall processes for many flows of interest, […]

Spring 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Jessy Grizzle, University of Michigan, “Michigan’s Robotics Department and Undergrad Curriculum – ‘Non c’è scommessa più persa di quella che non giocherò’ (There’s no bet more lost than the one I won’t even play)” — Ora by Jovanotti

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

This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT After 39 years as a faculty member with continuous NSF support, the speaker has graduated his last PhD students, closed his lab, and turned 100% to teaching. From June 2016 through June 2021, he led Michigan’s Robotics […]

Penn Engineering 2023-24 Heilmeier Faculty Award Lecture: Arjun Raj

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

"Can a cell learn?" Ever since the genetic code was deciphered, we have increasingly come to view cellular control through the lens of genetic determinism. In this paradigm, a cell's fate is already written into its DNA, which is in turn shaped by Darwinian evolution over the course of many generations. At the same time, […]

ASSET Seminar: “What Should We “Trust” in Trustworthy Machine Learning?” (Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania)

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

ABSTRACT: "Trustworthy Machine Learning" has become a buzz-word in recent years. But what exactly are the semantics of the promise that we are supposed to trust? In this talk we will make a proposal, through the lens of downstream decision makers using machine learning predictions of payoff relevant states: Predictions are "Trustworthy" if it is in the interests of the downstream decision […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Implementation and Performance of Wall Models for Large Eddy Simulation of Non-equilibrium Turbulent Boundary Layers”

Room B13, Chemistry Building 231 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Accurate prediction of high-Reynolds-number wall-bounded turbulent flows is essential for the understanding and flow control of many engineering applications such as aircraft, turbomachinery, and marine vehicles. Additionally, most practical flows exhibit nonequilibrium effects such as pressure gradient, flow separation, and mean three-dimensionality. However, the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of high-Reynolds-number wall-bounded turbulent flows is not […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Scalable and Risk-Aware Verification of Learning Enabled Autonomous Systems”

Moore 317 200 S 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

As autonomous systems become more prevalent, ensuring their safety will become more and more important. However, deriving guarantees for these systems is becoming increasingly difficult due to the use of black box, learning enabled components and the growing range of operating domains in which they are deployed. The complexity of the learning-enabled components greatly increases […]

ESE Spring Seminar – “Solving Inverse Problems with Generative Priors: From Low-rank to Diffusion Models”

Towne 337

: Generative priors are effective countermeasures to combat the curse of dimensionality, and enable efficient learning and inversion that otherwise are ill-posed, in data science. This talk begins with the classical low-rank prior, and introduces scaled gradient descent (ScaledGD), a simple iterative approach to directly recover the low-rank factors for a wide range of matrix […]

Spring 2024 GRASP SFI: Michel Hidalgo, Ekumen, “Doing robotics in digital labs: Or how simulations fuel robotics development”

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. This week's speaker will be virtual. Seminar attendees are also invited to a group discussion with Michel Hidalgo on Thursday, April 11th from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM on this link. ABSTRACT How do you do robotics without robots? […]

CBE Seminar: “Role of Water in Underwater Adhesion” (Ali Dhinojwala, University of Akron)

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

Abstract Roughness and wetness can disrupt interfacial bonding and reduce adhesion, and this phenomenon is of relevance for many biological and engineering applications. I will discuss how roughness affects both dry and wet adhesion as well as provide an overview of our current theoretical understanding in this area. My specific interest is in underwater adhesion, […]