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GRASP Industry Talk: Honda Research Institute, “Working with Imperfect Prediction on Autonomous Vehicles”

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. This seminar will NOT be recorded. ABSTRACT State of the art prediction can fail catastrophically when operating outside of the training distribution. We show methods that can be used to reduce these failures. We then outline how […]

PICS Colloquium: Unraveling Internal Friction in a Coarse-Grained Protein Model

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

Understanding the dynamic behavior of complex biomolecules requires simplified models that not only make computations feasible but also reveal fundamental mechanisms. Coarse-graining (CG) achieves this by grouping atoms into beads, whose stochastic dynamics can be derived using the Mori-Zwanzig formalism, capturing both reversible and irreversible interactions. In liquid, the dissipative bead-bead interactions have so far […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Leveraging Impedance-Related Properties for Free Self-Sensing in Actuators for Compact Robots”

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

Robotic systems, particularly at small scales, require efficient actuation and sensing solutions that maintain compactness. We are interested in systems where sensing and actuation are seamlessly integrated, specifically using impedance-related properties—such as electrical resistance, induced electromotive force (emf), and inductance— for free self-sensing in actuators without additional sensors. We explore three main example applications: (1) […]

Spring 2025 GRASP Seminar: Sarah Keren, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, “Encouraging Autonomous Agents to Behave Nicely”

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

This will be an in-person event only with attendance in Levine 307. This seminar will NOT be recorded. ABSTRACT Autonomous AI agents are deployed in increasingly complex and uncertain environments where they must account for the presence of other agents while trying to achieve their own objectives. Moreover, such agents may require assistance from other […]

MEAM Seminar: “Neural Operator for Scientific Computing”

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

Accurate simulations of physical phenomena governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are foundational to scientific computing. While traditional numerical methods have proven effective, they remain computationally intensive, particularly for complex, large-scale systems. This talk introduces the neural operator, a machine learning framework that approximates solution operators in infinite-dimensional spaces, enabling efficient and scalable PDE simulations […]

Spring 2025 GRASP Seminar: Shenlong Wang, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Interactive Images, Videos, and Worlds”

Levine 512

This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 512 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Our group's goal is to build a world simulator from visual observations that can answer "what-if" questions. In pursuit of this goal, we develop various methods for modeling the world from images and harnessing physical simulation and […]

ESE Spring Seminar – “Towards quantum interconnects: entangling microwave and optical photonic qubits”

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

Modern computing and communication technologies, such as supercomputers and the internet, are based on optically-linked networks of information processors operating at microwave frequencies. An analogous architecture has been proposed for quantum networks using optical photons to distribute entanglement between remote superconducting quantum processors. Here I will discuss our recent demonstration of a chip-scale source of […]

ESE Guest Seminar – “On Team Decision Problems with Nonclassical Information Structures”

Greenberg Lounge (Room 114), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Team theory is a mathematical formalism for decentralized stochastic control problems in which a “team,” consisting of a number of members, cooperates to achieve a common objective. It was developed to provide a rigorous mathematical framework of cooperating members in which all members have the same objective yet different information. In static team problems, the […]

Spring 2025 GRASP Seminar: Erdem Bıyık, University of Southern California, “Robot Learning with Minimal Human Feedback”

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 The lack of large robotics datasets is arguably the most important obstacle in front of robot learning. While large pretrained models and algorithms like reinforcement learning from human feedback led to breakthroughs in other domains like language […]

CIS Seminar: ” Specializing LLMs for Reliability”

Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, United States

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the frontiers of AI reasoning: they can synthesize information from multiple sources, derive new conclusions, and explain those conclusions to their users. However, LLMs do not do this reliably. They hallucinate facts, convincingly state incorrect deductions, and exhibit logical fallacies like confirmation bias. In this talk, I will describe […]