P.E.S.T.L.E. Orientation – February 3

https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752

Join P.E.S.T.L.E. for our Zoom Orientation session on Friday, February 3 at 4:00 pm! Please email us at pestle@seas.upenn.edu if you have any questions.

MEAM Seminar: “Designing Interfacial Phenomena for Water, Energy, and Sustainability”

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

Solid/water interfacial phenomena are pervasive in both natural and built environments. Heat exchangers, membrane pores, and packed bed reactors are all examples of solid/water interfaces where interfacial phenomena and small-scale fluid physics can have outsized influences on process efficacy and sustainability. Even innocuous surfaces such as reactor walls are not inert and can actively interact […]

Spring 2023 GRASP Seminar: Henry Fuchs, UNC Chapel Hill, “Augmented Reality Glasses: a 50-year Adventure”

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

This is an in-person only event with attendance in Raisler Lounge (Towne 225). The presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT Many of us foresee of a future in which AR eyeglasses are worn all day, replacing of our current prescription eyewear. That future may not arrive for a while and predicting its benefits and […]

ASSET Seminar: Using Large Language Models to Build Explainable Classifiers, Chris Callison-Burch (University of Pennsylvania)

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

ABSTRACT: I'll present research on using large language models (LLMs) to build explainable classifiers.   I will show off work from my PhD students and collaborators on several recent research directions: Image classification with explainable features  (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11158) Text classification with explainable features (work in progress) The importance of faithfulness in explanations (https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11326) (Time permitting) A […]

Spring 2023 GRASP SFI: Melkior Ornik, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “System Resilience and Guaranteed Performance in the Face of Unexpected Adversity”

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

This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT The ability of a system to correctly respond to a sudden adverse event is critical for high-level autonomy in complex, changing, or remote environments. By assuming continuing structural knowledge about […]

ESE Spring Seminar – “Reliable Data-Driven Decision-Making Systems”

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

Despite impressive success in domains such as vision and language, machine learning is still far from reliable integration into many challenging real-world scenarios, such as healthcare, where the coverage of existing data and the ability to collect new, diverse data are limited. This talk focuses on mathematically formulating and addressing some of the challenges in […]

BE Seminar: “Probing Metabolism Across Scales” (Yihui Shen, Princeton University)

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

Metabolism supports the biosynthetic and energetic demand of all living creatures. Over decades, we have accumulated knowledge of how individual enzymes work in vitro, but we don’t have a good sense about how they work together in vivo. Thus, fundamental to our understanding of metabolic operation is the ability to measure metabolic activity in vivo. […]

CIS Seminar: “Software Security Challenges in the Era of Modern Hardware”

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

Today’s hardware cannot keep secrets. Indeed, the past two decades have seen the discovery of a slew of attacks where an adversary exploits hardware features to leak software’s sensitive data. These attacks have shaken the foundations of computer security and caused a major disruption in the software industry. Fortunately, there has been a saving grace, namely the widespread adoption […]

Spring 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Rodney Brooks, Robust.AI, “Academic research: exploration vs exploitation”

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. This week's presenter will be in-person as well.    ABSTRACT Intelligent action is critical in robotics, more so than much of AI where results are often mediated by humans in the loop. That said, robotics also needs to […]

PICS Colloquium: “Building and using virtual models of the tricuspid valve toward better understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of its diseases”

PICS Conference Room 534 - A Wing , 5th Floor 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Computer simulations have become critical elements of the medical device design and regulatory approval process. Naturally, the predictability and therefore value of such simulations depends highly on their accuracy. Especially for the design of heart valve replacements and repair technologies computer simulations have become a critical tool. While much progress has been made in modeling […]