ESE Spring Seminar – “Architecting High Performance Silicon Systems for Accurate and Efficient On-Chip Deep Learning”

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

The unabated pursuit for omniscient and omnipotent AI is levying hefty latency, memory, and energy taxes at all computing scales. At the same time, the end of Dennard scaling is sunsetting traditional performance gains commonly attained with reduction in transistor feature size. Faced with these challenges, my research is building a heterogeneity of solutions co-optimized […]

MEAM Seminar: “Bioinspired Microrobotic Systems for Interfacing with Cells and Tissues”

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

Control over the microscopic world, at the scale of the smallest organisms, depends on the development of robots and machines that can operate at micro-nanoscales. However, fundamental limitations in the efficient miniaturization of macro-scale robotic technologies require bioinspired/hybrid approaches for actuation, sensing, and control of microrobots. Recent advances in materials, fabrication and actuation technologies have […]

MSE Seminar: “Textile Materials for Soft Wearable Robotics” (Stanford University)

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

Wearable robots and devices—garments with embedded elements that actuate to change shape or apply forces to the wearer, typically based on signals from integrated sensors—offer promise for assistive and augmentative applications including rehabilitative gloves, haptic devices, and dynamically thermoregulating clothing. Early iterations of wearables from the 50s and 60s primarily took the form of rigid […]

CIS Seminar: “The Design of a General-Purpose Distributed Execution System”

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

Scaling applications with distributed execution has become the norm. With the rise of big data and machine learning, more and more developers must build applications that involve complex and data-intensive distributed processing. In this talk, I will discuss the design of a general-purpose distributed execution system that can serve as a common platform for such […]

ASSET Seminar: Computational Social Listening for Public Health (Sharath Guntuku, University of Pennsylvania)

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

ABSTRACT: How can A.I.-based methods inform social listening applications during public health crises? The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted the mode and method of human communication and interaction. The magnitude of the pandemic has led to an ‘infodemic’ along with considerable increase in stress and anxiety across communities. At the same time, the use of social […]

CBE Seminar Series: “Electrification and Decarbonization of Chemical Synthesis” (Karthish Manthiram, California Institute of Technology)

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

Abstract: Chemical synthesis is responsible for significant emissions of carbon dioxide worldwide. These emissions arise not only due to the energy requirements of chemical synthesis, but since hydrocarbon feedstocks can be overoxidized or used as hydrogen sources. Using renewable electricity to drive chemical synthesis may provide a route to overcoming these challenges, enabling synthetic routes […]

MSE Seminar: “Interacting Opto-Moiré Quantum Matter” (University of Washington)

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

Moiré superlattices of two-dimensional (2D) materials are an emerging platform for studying new physical phenomena with high tunability. Strong excitonic responses in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) allow optical access to the wealth of physics. In this talk, I will present our recent results about interactions between excitons and charge carriers trapped in moiré potentials. We […]

ESE Spring Seminar – “Supercharging Programming Through Compiler Technology”

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

The decline of Moore's law and an increasing reliance on computation has led to an explosion of specialized software packages and hardware architectures. While this diversity enables unprecedented flexibility, it also requires domain-experts to learn how to customize programs to efficiently leverage the latest platform-specific API's and data structures, instead of working on their intended […]

CIS Seminar: “Designing Provably Performant Networked Systems”

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

 As networked systems become critical infrastructure, their design must reflect their new societal role. Today, we build systems with hundreds of heuristics but often do not understand their inherent and emergent behaviors. I will present a set of tools and techniques to prove performance properties of heuristics running in real-world conditions. Rigorous proofs can not […]