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MEAM Seminar: “Computational Design of Origami and Compliant Robots”

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

Soft and compliant robots provide new opportunities for machines that are flexible, adaptable, safe, and robust. Origami-inspired engineering enables custom robots to be designed and fabricated within days, or even hours. These robots are capable of executing a variety of shape-changing and dynamical tasks by taking advantage of their folded shape and programmable mechanics. In […]

CIS Grace Hopper Distinguished Lecture: “AGI is Coming… Is HCI Ready?”

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

We are at a transformational junction in computing, in the midst of an explosion in capabilities of foundational AI models that may soon match or exceed typical human abilities for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, a milestone often termed Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Achieving AGI (or even closely approaching it) will transform computing, with […]

Fall 2023 GRASP Seminar: Shangzhe Wu, Stanford University, “Learning 3D Fauna and Flora in the Wild”

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

This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Raisler Lounge and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Nature presents a captivating confluence of diversity and similarity. In order to make sense of our visual experiences in the world, humans as well as other natural intelligences are innately adept at recognizing the underlying intrinsic patterns, by […]

ASSET Seminar: “Robust Machine Learning with Foundation Models” (Aditi Raghunathan, Carnegie Mellon University)

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

ABSTRACT: In recent years, foundation models—large pretrained models that can be adapted for a wide range of tasks—have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. While the pretrained models are trained on broad data, the adaptation (or fine-tuning) process is often performed on limited data. As a result, the challenges of distribution shift, where […]

Fall 2023 GRASP SFI: Ge Yang, NSF Institute of AI and Fundamental Interactions and MIT CSAIL, “Feature Fields for Robotics: Language-Grounded Perception and Mapping at Multiple Scales”

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

This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT What kind of representation do robots need in order to be as generally capable as humans in handling unseen scenarios? Recent work in vision and vision-language foundation models has become quite good at telling what is in a scene, but they do […]

CBE Seminar: “Fabrication and Long-term Reliability of High Efficiency Monocrystalline Silicon Solar Cells” (Agarwal, Colorado School of Mines)

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

Global energy demand will continue to increase, and the ability of fossil fuels to meet these demands is limited due to the associated climate change concerns. In response to these concerns, new energy installations are increasingly based on renewable energy resources such as wind and solar. To further develop solar energy as a renewable energy […]

MSE Grace Hopper Lecture: “Quantum Simulations for Quantum Technologies,” (Giulia Galli – University of Chicago)

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

In this talk, I will describe theoretical and computational strategies based on quantum mechanical calculations, aimed at predicting material properties suitable for the development of quantum technologies. Specifically, I will discuss the electronic structure and coherent states of spin defects in two- and three-dimensional semiconductors and insulators, obtained using both classical and near-term quantum computers.

PRECISE Seminar: Formal Methods for Computer Architecture: Reducing the Barriers to Entry

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

Formal methods can provide strong correctness guarantees for today's computing systems, but their usage is often restricted to formal methods experts. Formal verification is then bottlenecked on these experts, limiting its effectiveness. This problem is acute in computer architecture, since many architects do not have formal methods expertise. In this talk, I will present recent […]

Fall 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Marc Miskin, University of Pennsylvania, “Tiny Robots”

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 on Zoom. ABSTRACT Nature routinely makes smart, complex, yet microscopically tiny machines. But how can humans do it? And can we do it in a way that is easy to design and understand? This talk is about building microscopic robots, those […]

CBE Doctoral Dissertation: “From Nanoplates to Bottlebrushes: Engineering Thermodynamics in Polymer Nanocomposites” (Christian Tabedzki)

DRL A2

Abstract: Polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) represent a diverse class of materials where manipulating design parameters is crucial for tailoring material properties. Of utmost importance for nanocomposites is nanoparticle dispersion, which is affected by the nanoparticle itself as well as the overall polymer melt, providing two design routes. This dissertation explores PNCs through two distinctive systems: (1) […]