IDEAS/STAT Optimization Seminar: Resilient Distributed Optimization for Cyberphysical Systems

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

Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722   Abstract: This talk considers the problem of resilient distributed multi-agent optimization for cyberphysical systems in the presence of malicious or non-cooperative agents. It is assumed that stochastic values of trust between agents are available which allows agents to learn their trustworthy neighbors simultaneously with performing updates to minimize their own local […]

CIS Seminar: “Correctness Matters: Automatic Software Engineering in the age of Generative AI”

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

Software engineers never start from a blank page, but rather from an extant and usually long-running project in need of modification (for repair, extension, update, etc.). One way to view modern programming is thus as a continual process of iteratively transforming existing programs into something new, and hopefully better. In this talk, I will discuss […]

ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Neural Compression: Estimating and Achieving the Fundamental Limits”

Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 515 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, United States

Neural compression, which pertains to compression schemes that are learned from data using neural networks, has emerged as a powerful approach for compressing real-world data. Neural compressors often outperform classical schemes, especially in settings where reconstructions that are perceptually similar to the source are desired. Despite their empirical success, the fundamental principles governing how neural […]

MSE PhD Defense: “Chromatin as an Active and Adaptive Material”

CEMB Conference room, LRSM 3231 Walnut Street, Room 112-C, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The three-dimensional organization of chromatin within the cell nucleus plays a critical role in regulating gene expression, maintaining genome stability, and guiding cellular responses to environmental cues. Despite advances in imaging and sequencing technologies, the fundamental principles governing chromatin architecture and dynamics, particularly the role of associated proteins like HP1α in driving these processes, remain […]

ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Machine Learning for Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems”

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

Directly training deep learning models for applications in large-scale cyber-physical systems can be intractable due to the large number of components and decision variables. Instead, we focus on exploiting spatial symmetries in systems by designing size-generalizable architectures. Once trained on small-scale examples, such architectures exhibit equivalent or comparable performance on large-scale systems. The first example […]

Confirmation Bias, the Original Error. A master class with Prof. Konrad Kording

RSVP at https://bit.ly/3RzmdVH Learn what confirmation bias is, how to identify it in your own research, and acquire the skills to mitigate it. Yes, it turns out, we’re all biased and this can negatively impact your research. Join Professor Konrad Kording in this live training session based on the Community for Rigor's new educational unit. […]

ESE 5160 Special Lecture: “Taking RoboRacer Off-Road: Learning Extreme Off-Road Mobility”

Towne 327

In this guest lecture, we will cover two recent research thrusts from the RobotiXX lab in taking RoboRacer off-road: high-speed off-road navigation and wheeled mobility on vertically challenging terrain. For high-speed off-road navigation, we will introduce a sequential line of work with every work inspired by and built upon its prior work, ranging from inverse […]

ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Inverse design for engineering complex light-matter interaction”

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

The inverse design paradigm has emerged as a transformative approach for the synthesis of nanophotonic structures, offering a powerful alternative to conventional intuition-driven design. By approaching photonic device design as a computational optimization problem, inverse design enables the systematic exploration of high-dimensional parameter spaces to uncover non- intuitive structures that meet complex performance targets. This […]

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Structure and transport properties of nanoporous polymers derived from lyotropic mesophases” (Christopher Johnson)

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

Abstract: Burgeoning energy and water scarcity challenges motivate the development of new membrane materials for charge transport as well as chemical and water separations. This in turn requires an improved understanding of the physics that govern charged and uncharged solute transport in membranes, and particularly the motion of such species in nm-scale confinement in polymeric […]