CIS Seminar: “Deep Learning Models for Language: What they learn, where they fail, and how to make them more robust”

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

Abstract: Deep learning has become pervasive in everyday life, powering language applications like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Translate. The inherent limitation of these deep learning systems, however, is that they often function as a “black box,” preventing researchers and users from discerning the roles of different components and what they learn during the […]

ESE seminar: “Engineering the Quantum Vacuum”

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

The vacuum of space may seem empty and boring; however, this void is actually teeming with activity. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, fluctuations of electromagnetic fields are omnipresent even in empty space. These fluctuations can manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including the generation of nanoscale forces between objects—a phenomenon known as […]

CIS Seminar:” Physical Scene Understanding”

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

Abstract: Human intelligence is beyond pattern recognition. From a single image, we're able to explain what we see, reconstruct them in 3D, predict what's going to happen, and plan our actions. In this talk, I will present our recent work on physical scene understanding---reverse-engineering these capacities to make machines that are versatile, data-efficient, and have […]

ESE Seminar: “Hybrid Quantum Networks: Interfacing Photons, Phonons, and Superconducting Qubits”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Quantum information science strives to utilize the fundamental laws of physics to achieve revolutionary improvement in computation, communication, and sensing. Existing quantum protocols rely on a wide variety of physical platforms for storing, transferring, and processing of quantum information. Optical photons are the ideal carriers of information because of their low loss, large bandwidth of […]

ESE Seminar: “Physics-Driven Sensing and Processing: From Computational Periscopy to Particle Beam Microscopy”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

In many areas of science and engineering, novel signal acquisition methods allow unprecedented access to physical measurements. From digital cameras to microscopes and nano-scale biosensors, the data generated are shaped by both the underlying physics of the phenomena and characteristics of the acquisition device. Meanwhile, in many practical scenarios, the useful signals are remarkably weak, […]

CIS Seminar: “Cataloging the Visible Universe through Bayesian Inference at Petascale”

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

Abstract: A key task in astronomy is to locate astronomical objects in images and to characterize them according to physical parameters such as brightness, color, and morphology. This task, known as cataloging, is challenging for several reasons: many astronomical objects are much dimmer than the sky background, labeled data is generally unavailable, overlapping astronomical objects […]