MSE Seminar: “Tuning Nanostructured Materials for Combustion Applications” (Kerri-lee A. Chintersingh, Ph.D., New Jersey Institute of Technology)

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

Metals powders like aluminum and boron are attractive potential fuel additives for pyrotechnics, propellants and explosives due to their high energy release upon oxidation. However, they tend to agglomerate, have lengthy ignition delays, and low combustion rates/efficiencies. This work aims to design metal powders with tuned surface, micro-structure, morphology, or chemistries to mitigate these challenges […]

Herman P. Schwan Distinguished Lecture: “Engineering Proteins, Genomes, Viruses & Organs” (George Church, Harvard & MIT)

Zoom

Our exponential technologies for reading, writing genomes and epigenomes combined with AI-ML has enabled large libraries and selections for radical new functions — e.g. resistance to all viruses, novel delivery vectors for gene therapies, xeno-transplantation, de-extinction, and de-aging. This lecture will be held remotely. Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/94497096918?pwd=5qeoyMcmEyDboMW3bKgSCmWKYBMCbP.1  

Spring 2025 GRASP Seminar: Nat Trask, University of Pennsylvania, “Geometric structure preservation in probabilistic digital twins”

Wu & Chen Auditorium

This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Motivated by the ever-increasing success of machine learning in language and vision models, many aim to build AI-driven tools for scientific simulation and discovery. Contemporary techniques drastically lag behind their comparatively mature counterparts in modeling and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Digital Twins for the Earth System”

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

Reliable forecasts of the Earth system are crucial for human progress and safety from natural disasters. Artificial intelligence offers substantial potential to improve prediction accuracy and computational efficiency in this field, however this remains underexplored in many domains. Here we introduce Aurora, a large-scale foundation model for the Earth system trained on over a million […]

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “A molecular understanding of the structure-property relationships of model end-linked polymer networks” (Han Zhang)

Room 35, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Abstract: Polymer networks, including thermoplastics, thermosets, elastomers and gels, are among the most versatile and widely utilized polymeric materials, with applications spanning drug delivery systems, membranes and implantable devices. A comprehensive understanding of the intricate relationship between the macroscopic properties and the structure and topology of polymer networks is crucial for advancing their utilization and […]

CIS Seminar: “Thinking Outside the GPU: Systems for Scalable Machine Learning Pipelines”

Wu & Chen Auditorium

Scalable and efficient machine learning (ML) systems have been instrumental in fueling recent advancements in ML capabilities. However, further scaling these systems requires more than simply increasing the number and performance of accelerators. This is because modern ML deployments rely on complex pipelines composed of many diverse and interconnected systems.  In this talk, I will […]

ASSET Seminar: “Steering Machine Learning Ecosystems of Interacting Agents”

Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, United States

Abstract:  Modern machine learning models—such as LLMs and recommender systems—interact with humans, companies, and other models in a broader ecosystem. However, these multi-agent interactions often induce unintended ecosystem-level outcomes such as clickbait in classical content recommendation ecosystems, and more recently, safety violations and market concentration in nascent LLM ecosystems. In this talk, I discuss my […]

Spring 2025 GRASP & CIS Seminar: Yossi Gandelsman, University of California, Berkeley, “Interpreting the Inner Workings of Vision Models”

Heilmeier Hall (Room 100), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Towne 100 Heilmeier Hall and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT In this talk, I present an approach for interpreting the internal computation in deep vision models. I show that these interpretations can be used to detect model bugs and to improve the performance of pre-trained […]

CBE Seminar: “Toward Efficient and Synthesizable In-silico Molecular Design” (Wenhao Gao, MIT)

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

Abstract: The discovery of functional molecules plays a fundamental role in advancing chemical science and engineering, yet it remains a costly and time-intensive process. Recent advances in computational methods, particularly in generative artificial intelligence, have introduced a new approach—generative molecular design—which holds the promise of efficiently identifying molecules with desired properties. However, despite significant progress, […]