Today in the U.S., we deal with the severe, wide ranging effects of climate change from the West to East Coast in the form of heat waves, drought, wildfires, and flooding. To end these disasters, we need to drastically change the way we produce and use energy. For example, in 2020, over 72 % of […]
The past two decades have witnessed incredible advances towards the design of autonomous systems. This talk will discuss the role of motion planning in yielding solutions for an agent that is able to execute a variety of tasks in a variety of settings. Problem decomposition has been and remains a difficult task, and motion planning […]
Room: Towne 225/Raisler Lounge For zoom link, contact manu@seas.upenn.edu.
Most materials suffer from a disease: fatigue. Symptoms include degradation of properties and growth of cracks under cyclic stretch. These materials are unfit for applications involving prolonged and cyclic loads. A crack grows in a material because the crack tip concentrates stress. Recently, we have been developing fatigue-resistant materials by de-concentrating stress, through mechanisms at […]
Scale appears to be the winning recipe in today's leaderboards. And yet, extreme-scale neural models are still brittle to make errors that are often nonsensical and even counterintuitive. In this talk, I will argue for the importance of knowledge, especially commonsense knowledge, and demonstrate how smaller models developed in academia can still have an edge over larger industry-scale models, if powered with knowledge. […]
Launched in May 2021, the Future Leaders in Mechanobiology is a monthly seminar series featuring up-and-coming leaders in mechanobiology–PhD students and postdocs from a wide range of fields, backgrounds, and institutions. By providing an international stage to share one’s work and opportunities to interact with researchers at all career stages, we aim to create an inclusive and […]
Abstract The hydrocarbon processing industry is in the midst of a major shift in feedstocks, structure, and products. Aggressive carbon abatement targets and intrinsic efficiency advantages from electric vehicles strongly undercut the advantages of fossil fuels, which are the majority product of this industry. However, the immense value of the existing hydrocarbon infrastructure suggests that […]
Room: Towne 225/Raisler Lounge For zoom link, contact manu@seas.upenn.edu.
Current technology for decelerating a spacecraft from the high speed of atmospheric entry to the final stages of landing on Mars is based on low-density supersonic decelerators such as low mass and high packaging efficiency parachute systems. To enable future exploration missions featuring sophisticated robots and safely land heavier spacecraft on Mars, larger than before […]
Distributed estimation is a central task in modern data science, where datasets are often generated from distributed sources or are too large to be stored on a centralized machine, and communication is subject to bandwidth and privacy limitations. In this talk, we will consider the problem of estimating high-dimensional distributions and their parameters from distributed […]
