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ESE Fall Colloquium – “Phase Transitions, Symmetry, and Reed-Muller Codes on BMS Channels”

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

This talk will begin by discussing phase transitions in high-dimensional statistical inference problems. Some effort will be made to distinguish between problems with random structure (e.g., random codes and sparse PCA) and problems with deterministic structure (e.g., highly symmetric codes such as Reed-Muller codes). For problems with deterministic structure, we will observe that symmetry can […]

ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Resilient, Information Theoretic, Active Exploration for Multi-Robot Teams”

Room 313, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Over the past decades we have seen robots move from constrained and heavily designed industrial environments out into the world. Along with this shift there is a need for smaller, safer, and less expensive robots which can complete tasks autonomously in teams, sometimes covering large areas. Multi-robot teams can expand the capabilities of a single […]

Fall 2022 GRASP on Robotics: Radhika Nagpal, Princeton University, “Towards Collective Artificial Intelligence”

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

This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT In nature, groups of thousands of individuals cooperate to create complex structure purely through local interactions — from cells that form complex organisms, to social insects like termites and ants that build nests and self-assemble bridges, to the […]

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Multibreath Hyperpolarized Gas Imaging of Lung Ventilation and Gas Exchange in Humans for Diagnosis and Treatment Response Monitoring” (Hooman Hamedani)

Donner-Grice Auditorium

The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Rahim Rizi are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Hooman Hamedani. Title: Multibreath Hyperpolarized Gas Imaging of Lung Ventilation and Gas Exchange in Humans for Diagnosis and Treatment Response Monitoring Date: November 11th, 2022 Time: 1:00 PM-3:00 PM Location: Donner - Grice Auditorium, 2 Dulles […]

ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Analysis and Control of Neural Network Dynamical Systems”

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

Integrating machine learning and control systems has achieved remarkable success in controlling complex dynamical systems such as autonomous vehicles. However, the resulting controlled system often has a neural network (NN) in the loop which represents the system dynamics, control policy, or perception. The nonlinearity and large scale of NNs make it challenging to provide formal […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Enabling Ultra-Low Viscosity Lubricants Through Fundamental Understanding of ZDDPs Anti-Wear Additives and their Tribofilm Growth Mechanisms: An In-Situ Study”

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

Lubricants with low viscosity have the potential to improve fuel efficiency in engines due to friction reduction. However, a reduction in viscosity increases the likelihood of wear. Zinc dialkyldithiophosphate (ZDDP), the most widely used antiwear additive in engine oils, has been extensively studied over the last few decades. ZDDP forms surface-bound tribofilms at sliding contacts […]

MEAM Seminar: “Cell Packings and Tissue Flows in Developing Embryos”

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

During embryonic development, groups of cells reorganize into functional tissues with complex form and structure. Tissue reorganization can be rapid and dramatic, often occurring through striking embryo-scale flows that are mediated by the coordinated actions of hundreds or thousands of cells. In Drosophila, cell rearrangements in the embryonic epithelium rapidly narrow and elongate the tissue, […]

ESE Fall Colloquium – “Using Information Geometry to Find Simple Models of Complex Processes”

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

Effective theories play a fundamental role in how we reason about the world. Although real physical processes are very complicated, useful models abstract away the irrelevant degrees of freedom to give parsimonious representations. In contrast, overly complex models can be difficult to evaluate, suffer from numerical instabilities, and may overfit data. They also obscure useful […]

ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense – “Learning and Control of Network Phenomena”

Room 401B, 3401 Walnut 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The intersection of dynamical systems and networks are used to model a huge variety of phenomena such as the spread of disease, multi-agent systems, opinions in social networks, and more. Many properties of these network phenomena can be understood by examining the eigenvalue spectrum of a matrix representation of the underlying graph. Using this intuition, […]

CIS Seminar: “Generative multitask learning mitigates target-causing confounding”

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

We propose a simple and scalable approach to causal representation learning for multitask learning. Our approach requires minimal modification to existing ML systems, and improves robustness to prior probability shift. The improvement comes from mitigating unobserved confounders that cause the targets, but not the input. We refer to them as target-causing confounders. These confounders induce […]