ODEI Spotlight: Truth Telling, The Media, and Social Equity

Following Remarks by Penn President Amy Gutmann there will be a panel featuring: Andrea Mitchell - Chief Washington Correspondent and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent NBC News Jamil Smith - Emmy Award Winning Producer and Senior Writer Rolling Stone David Freedlander - Journalist and Author of The AOC Generation: How Millenials are Seizing Power and Rewriting […]

ESE Seminar: “Demystifying (Deep) Reinforcement Learning: The Optimist, The Pessimist, and Their Provable Efficiency”

Zoom - Email ESE for Link jbatter@seas.upenn.edu

Coupled with powerful function approximators such as deep neural networks, reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous empirical successes. However, its theoretical understandings lag behind. In particular, it remains unclear how to provably attain the optimal policy with a finite regret or sample complexity. In this talk, we will present the two sides of the same coin, […]

ODEI Spotlight: Inclusive Technology, Provocations for Research and Design

Abstract: Perceptions of digital technology have grown increasingly cynical over the last decade, fueled by crises from the Snowden leaks to Cambridge Analytica to disinformation campaigns.  Critical thinking about who is accommodated and who is excluded by mainstream technology is crucial for living up to promises of technology as empowering, but what do these reflections […]

MEAM Seminar: “Control of Turbulent Wall Shear Flows and the Potential for ‘Designer Turbulence'”

Zoom - Email MEAM for Link peterlit@seas.upenn.edu

The financial and environmental cost of turbulence is staggering: manage to quell turbulence in the thin boundary layers on the surface of a commercial airliner and you could almost halve the total aerodynamic drag, dramatically cutting fuel burn, emissions and cost of operation. Yet systems-level tools to model scale interactions or control turbulence remain relatively […]

ESE Seminar: “Surpassing Fundamental Limits through Time Varying Electromagnetics”

Zoom - Email ESE for Link jbatter@seas.upenn.edu

Surpassing the fundamental limits that govern all electromagnetic structures, such as reciprocity and the delay-bandwidth-size limit, will have a transformative impact on all applications based on electromagnetic circuits and systems. For instance, violating principles of reciprocity enables non-reciprocal components such as isolators and circulators, which find application in full-duplex wireless radios, radar, bio-medical imaging, and […]

CIS Seminar: “Human-AI Systems for Making Video Useful”

Zoom - Email CIS for link cherylh@cis.upenn.edu

Video is becoming a core medium for communicating a wide range of content, including educational lectures, vlogs, and how-to tutorials. While videos are engaging and informative, they lack the familiar and useful affordances of text for browsing, skimming, and flexibly transforming information. This severely limits who can interact with video content and how they can […]