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PICS Colloquium: “Physics-compatible kinetic-energy and entropy preserving (KEEP) scheme for high-fidelity simulation of compressible turbulence”

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

Low (or ideally zero) numerical dissipation is always critical for high-fidelity scale-resolving flow simulations, as numerical dissipation prevents the physics of inviscid kinetic energy and entropy conservation, which is an essential attribute of compressible turbulence. However, contrary to the requirement, numerical schemes in compressible flow heavily rely on numerical dissipation for stable computation, preventing high-fidelity […]

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Identifying Material Fingerprints of Relevance to Understand Adsorbate-Surface Interactions Using First Principles Modeling and Machine Learning” (Genesis Quiles-Galarza)

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

Abstract: Adsorption of chemical species on surfaces of materials is one of the critical phenomenon governing the reactivity and activity of the material for surface and interface driven chemical reactions. At the core of the analytical $d$-band adsorption model is the correlation between the adsorption energy of a chemical species (molecule or reaction intermediate) on […]

MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Optical Analysis of Buckling-Induced Micro-Robotic Membranes”

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

In recent years, micro-robotic membranes have attracted increasing interest due to their unique properties and potential applications in various fields. The optical properties of these membranes have been playing a crucial role in the design and development of optical devices such as reflective displays with customizable colors. The primary challenge to understanding the mechanical-spectral interaction […]

MEAM Seminar: “Flows About Superhydrophobic Surfaces”

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

Superhydrophobic surfaces, formed by air entrapment within the cavities of hydrophobic solid substrates, offer a promising potential for hydrodynamic drag reduction. In several of the prototypical surface geometries the flows are two-dimensional, governed by Laplace’s equation in the longitudinal problem and the biharmonic equation in the transverse problem. Moreover, low-drag configurations are typically associated with […]

Sustainable Catering – Earth Week 2024

Lobby and Mezzanine, Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Learn about sustainable products and practices your caterer can implement to reduce waste, minimize plastic and lower carbon footprint. Planet-friendly menu Plastic-alternative packaging and utensils Nutrition label for customized eating preferences Vendor engagement beyond delivery.

MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Gaussian Process-Based Active Exploration Strategies in Vision and Touch”

Meyerson Hall, Room B2 210 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Robots struggle to understand object properties like shape, material, and semantics due to limited prior knowledge, hindering manipulation in unstructured environments. In contrast, humans learn these properties through interactive multi-sensor exploration. This work proposes fusing visual and tactile observations into a unified Gaussian Process Distance Field (GPDF) representation for active perception of object properties. While […]

PICS Colloquium: “Exploiting time-domain parallelism to accelerate neural network training and PDE constrained optimization”

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

This talk will explore methods for accelerating numerical optimization constrained by transient problems using parallelism. Two types of transient problems will be considered. In the first case training algorithms for Neural ODEs will be discussed. Neural ODEs are a class of neural network architecture where the depth of the neural network (the layers) is modeled […]

ASSET Seminar: “Statistical Methods for Trustworthy Language Modeling” (Tatsu Hashimoto, Stanford University)

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

ABSTRACT: Language models work well, but they are far from trustworthy. Major open questions remain on high-stakes issues such as detecting benchmark contamination, identifying LM-generated text, and reliably generating factually correct outputs. Addressing these challenges will require us to build more precise, reliable algorithms and evaluations that provide guarantees that we can trust. Despite the […]

Spring 2024 GRASP SFI: Harish Ravichandar, Georgia Institute of Technology, “New Wine in an Old Bottle: A Structured Approach to Democratize Robot Learning”

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

This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Decades of rigorous research in dynamical systems and control helped us integrate robots into a wide variety of domains, ranging from factory floors to the moon. Today, it would appear that deep learning has taken over the […]

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John A. Quinn Distinguished Lecture in Chemical Engineering: “Exploring the Physics, Materials Science, and Biological Implications of Polyelectrolyte Complexation” (Matthew Tirrell, University of Chicago)

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

Abstract The richness of liquid-liquid phase separation behavior in mixtures of oppositely-charged polyelectrolyte has been greatly illuminated recently in the polymer physics literature. Precise determinations of phase diagrams, measurements of interfacial tension, scattering measurements of chain configurations, and increasingly insightful theory are all producing a clearer understanding of these phenomena. In parallel, physics is also […]