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 […]

Spring 2025 GRASP SFI: Harshil Parekh, BotBuilt, “From GRASP to BotBuilt: Using Robotics and AI to Revolutionize Construction”

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 Construction remains one of the least automated industries, struggling with labor shortages, inefficiencies, and rising costs. At BotBuilt, we are revolutionizing the way homes are built by leveraging robotics and AI to automate framing, making construction faster, […]

CBE Seminar: “Prioritization of Research, Development, and Deployment Pathways for a Circular Bioeconomy” (Jeremy Guest, UIUC)

Wu & Chen Auditorium

Abstract: Societies have prospered using a linear “take-make-use-dispose” approach, extracting natural resources to make products, using them, and ultimately discarding them or their residues. This unsustainable approach has exploited natural resources at a rate that has caused excessive pollution and loss of biodiversity, and is leading to a global climate crisis. In response to this […]

CBE Seminar: “Machine-learning-assisted Atomistic Modeling and Design of Complex Ionic Conductors for Next-Generation Energy Storage” (KyuJung Jun, MIT)

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

Abstract: Fast solid-state Li-ion conductors are a crucial class of materials with the potential to enable all-solid-state batteries, offering enhanced safety and energy density. However, these materials remain rare, and progress in developing novel solid electrolytes has been hindered by a lack of clear descriptors for superionic conductivity and a limited understanding of ion transport […]

IDEAS/STAT Optimization Seminar: “ML for an Interactive World: From Learning to Unlearning”

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

The remarkable recent success of Machine Learning (ML) is driven by our ability to develop and deploy interactive models that can solve complicated tasks by understanding and adapting to the ever-changing state of the world. However, the development of such models demands significant data and computing resources. Moreover, as these models increasingly interact with humans, […]

BE Seminar – “Scaffold-Modulated Healing in Irradiated Bone” (Katie Hixon, Dartmouth Engineering)

Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Bone is the third most common site for cancer metastasis, affecting ~66% of patients with common cancers—breast, lung, prostate, renal, thyroid—incurring skeletal events in up to 400,000 people in the US/year. Metastatic bone disease (MBD) results in weakened bone, leading to refractory pain and pathological fracture that increase disease state morbidity. Despite bone tissue’s dynamic […]

CIS Seminar: “Realizing the Promise of Language-level Security in Real Systems”

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

Promises are cheap. Software vendors routinely describe their offerings as “secure”, but few are based on designs that can guarantee even the most basic security properties. To address this problem, services like Cloudflare, Android, and Firefox are increasingly relying on languages like Rust and WebAssembly to provide safety by design. But these promises too can […]