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MEAM Seminar: “Propulsive Advantages of Coordinating Multiple Jets by Colonial Marine Organisms”

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

Salps and siphonophores are widespread marine animals that occur in centimeters to meters-long colonial chains and employ multiple, pulsed swimming jets. We use a combination of approaches including in situ and lab experiments, flow visualizations and custom high-speed camera systems to understand the morphology, kinematics and fluid mechanics that underpin efficient movement in these colonial […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Learning-NUM: Utility Maximization in Stochastic Queueing Networks”

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

We consider the problem of network utility maximization (NUM) and propose a new Learning-NUM framework,  where the users’ utility functions are unknown apriori and the utility function values can be observed only after the corresponding traffic is delivered to the destination.   We start by considering linear utility functions and propose a priority-based network control policy, […]

CIS Seminar: “Optimal Oblivious Reconfigurable Networks”

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

As Moore's Law slows down, packet switch capabilities are falling behind datacenter demands. Recent hardware advances have enabled the new switching technology of nanosecond-scale rapid circuit switches. Combined with novel network designs, these have the potential to fully replace packet switches. This talk presents the Oblivious Reconfigurable Network (ORN) design paradigm which is ideally suited […]

ESE Guest Seminar – “Safe Offline RL for Constrained Markov Decision Process: Theory and Practice”

Greenberg Lounge (Room 114), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Many constrained sequential decision-making processes such as safe AV navigation, wireless network control, caching, cloud computing, etc., can be cast as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP). Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have been used to learn optimal policies for unknown unconstrained MDP. Extending these RL algorithms to unknown CMDP, brings the additional challenge of not only […]

ASSET Seminar: “Some Displaced Vignettes on Generalized Notions of Equivariance”

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

Abstract: The explicit incorporation of task-specific inductive biases through symmetry has emerged as a crucial design precept in the development of high-performance machine learning models. Symmetry-aware neural networks, such as group equivariant networks, have achieved notable success in areas like protein and drug design, where capturing task-specific symmetries improves generalization. Recent efforts have focused on […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Semantics-Driven Active Perception and Navigation with Aerial Robots”

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

Autonomous aerial robots today are capable of safely navigating through cluttered, GPS-denied environments while constructing an accurate map that captures geometric features such as points, lines, and planes. Such maps are crucial for low-level planning and obstacle avoidance. However, beyond offering details on the density, layout, and dimensions of the environment, these maps provide limited […]

Fall 2024 GRASP SFI: Jun-Yan Zhu, Carnegie Mellon University, “Ensuring Data Ownership in Generative Visual Models”

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 Large-scale generative visual models have made content creation as little effort as writing a short text description. However, these models are typically trained on an enormous amount of Internet data, often containing copyrighted material, licensed images, and […]

CBE Seminar: “Optimizing Work and Heat flows in Sustainable Chemical Processes Using Attainable Regions” (Diane Hildebrandt, Rutgers University)

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

Abstract: A chemical process transforms feed materials into desired products, necessitating the exchange of heat and work between the process and the environment. Optimizing process performance requires careful selection of chemical pathways, process parameters, and heat/workflows. The reversible process sets the upper-performance limit for sustainable design, thereby setting a target for process design. We propose […]

MSE Seminar “Shaping a Soft Future”

Wu & Chen Auditorium

Existing devices—such as cell phones, computers, and robots – are made from rigid materials, which is in direct contrast to the soft materials that compose the human body. In this talk, I will discuss several topics related to studying and harnessing soft materials within the context of creating devices with tissue like properties. Liquid metal: Gallium-based […]

IDEAS Seminar: “Equivariant Neural Inertial Odometry”

Room 401B, 3401 Walnut 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Abstract:  In this talk, we introduce a new class of problems related to integrating inertial measurements obtained from an IMU that play a significant role in navigation combined with visual data. While there have been tremendous technological advances in the precision of instrumentation, integrating acceleration and angular velocity still suffers from drift in the displacement […]