ESE Spring Seminar – “Aligning Robot and Human Representations”

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

To perform tasks that humans want in the world, robots rely on a representation of salient task features; for example, to hand me a cup of coffee, the robot considers features like efficiency and cup orientation in its behavior. Prior methods try to learn both a representation and a downstream task jointly from data sets […]

CIS Seminar: ” E=Graphs for Next-Gen Programming Language Tools”

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

Building a state-of-the-art program optimizer, synthesizer, or verifier is still a gargantuan task for even programming language (PL) experts. Much of this challenge stems from the fact that term rewriting, a ubiquitous approach to manipulating programs, only works with one version of a program at a time. As a result, the system builder must carefully […]

Future Leaders in Mechanobiology: Avilash Singh Yadav (Cornell)

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

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 […]

ASSET Seminar: Automated Decision Making for Safety Critical Applications, Mykel Kochenderfer (Stanford University)

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

ABSTRACT: Building robust decision making systems for autonomous systems is challenging. Decisions must be made based on imperfect information about the environment and with uncertainty about how the environment will evolve. In addition, these systems must carefully balance safety with other considerations, such as operational efficiency. Typically, the space of edge cases is vast, placing a large […]

Spring 2023 GRASP SFI: Michael Chang, University of California, Berkeley, “Neural Software Abstractions: Learning Abstractions for Automatically Modeling and Manipulating Systems”

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 While it is tempting to view robotics as a nail that can be solved with the deep learning hammer, we have seen that deep-learning based perception and action pipelines for […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Nano-Optical and Electrical Imaging of Excitonic Semiconductor Interfaces”

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

As nanotechnology plays essential parts in developing of high performance or new concepts of electrical and optical devices, new class of nanomaterials has emerged to beat conventional optical and electronic devices. Mixed-dimensional hetero-interfaces consisting of low-dimensional material components, have been the focus of ongoing research efforts to surpass Si-based device and to explore excitonic nano-optical […]

ESE Spring Seminar – “Risk-Aware Control and Planning in Unstructured Environments”

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

Providing safety and performance guarantees for motion planning and control algorithms is a well-studied problem for robotic systems with well-known dynamics that operate in structured environments. However, when robots operate in a real-world setting where the environment is dynamic and unstructured, common assumptions used to develop the planning algorithms are no longer valid and consequently, […]

Spring 2023 GRASP on Robotics: John Suh, Hyundai New Horizons Studio, “Ultimate mobility vehicles or what happens when you combine robotics and car design”

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 New Horizons Studio is a team that is focused on the design, technology, and engineering of ultimate mobility vehicles. NHS believes that the combination of robotics and car […]