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ESE PhD Seminar: “Learning Local Control Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Hybrid Systems”

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

Safety-critical control is one of the fundamental problems in autonomous systems. A special class of autonomous systems is the class of hybrid dynamical systems, which involves both continuous dynamic flow and discrete dynamical mode jumps for state evolution. I will introduce how to synthesize safe controllers for hybrid dynamical systems based on local control barrier […]

CIS Grace Hopper Distinguished Lecture: “OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Modeling”

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

Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both AI research and commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the significance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including […]

Fall 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Carnegie Mellon University, “Multimodal AI Agents”

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

This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT In recent years, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) with advanced general capabilities has paved the way towards building language-guided agents that can perform complex, multi-step tasks on behalf of users, much like human assistants. […]

PICS Colloquium with Daniel Tartakovsky: Information Theory of Multiscale Simulations

PICS Conference Room 534 - A Wing , 5th Floor 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

We present an information-theoretic approach for integration of multi-resolution data into multiscale simulations.  Fine-scale information can comprise observational data and/or simulation results related to both system states and system parameters. It is aggregated into its coarse-scale representation by setting a probabilistic equivalence between the two scales, with parameters that are determined via minimization of observables […]

MEAM Seminar: “Engineering Innovation in Maternal and Fetal Health: The Biomechanics of High-Risk Pregnancies”

Wu & Chen Auditorium

The reproductive soft tissues that support the fetus undergo some of the most dramatic and unique growth and remodeling events in the human body. The uterus and fetal membrane must grow and stretch during pregnancy to accommodate the fetus. Simultaneously, the cervix must remodel and be a mechanical barrier to keep the fetus within the […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Power Electronics is Cool. Trends and Opportunities for the Coming Decades”

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

For the past two decades, power management and delivery has been a bottleneck, limiting the size and performance of a range of applications from performance computing to mobile phones and wearables. In the coming decades, power electronics will become the ‘glue’ of the modern energy system network. With electronics embedded deeply into this network, well […]

CIS Seminar: “Scaling Machine-Checkable Systems Verification in Coq”

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

System software like operating systems and hypervisors forms the critical backbone of our computing infrastructure. However, due to their size and complexity, these systems often contain vulnerabilities that can compromise security. Formal verification offers a solution by mathematically proving software correctness, but its adoption is hindered by the substantial effort required to create these proofs. […]

ASSET Seminar: “Advancing Diffusion Models for Text Generation”

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

Abstract: Transformer-based language models have undoubtedly become the dominant and favorite architecture for language generation of our time. However, although they provide impressive text quality, they tend to be hard to control. In the domain of image synthesis, on the other hand, Denoising Diffusion Models (DDM) are the dominant approach, shining with unprecedented quality and […]

Fall 2024 GRASP SFI: Jonathan Michaux, University of Michigan, “Spheres Are All You Need: Risk-Aware Trajectory Planning in Radiance Fields”

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 Safe and efficient motion planning is crucial for robots operating in dynamic and unstructured environments. To accomplish this, one must address key challenges. First, robots must understand the scene geometry to prevent collisions that could harm humans […]

MSE Seminar: “Quantum Materials: A View from the Lattice”

Wu & Chen Auditorium

Connecting theoretical models for exotic quantum states to real materials is a key goal in quantum materials science.  The structure of the crystalline lattice plays a foundational role in this pursuit in the subfield of quantum material synthesis.  We here revisit this long-standing perspective in the context low dimensional emergent electronic phases of matter, including […]