MEAM Seminar: “Advancing the Versatility of Legged Robots and Assistive Devices”

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

Recent years have witnessed tremendous growth in the capabilities of legged robots, with quadrupeds and humanoids demonstrating athletic behaviors that even five years ago were out of reach. Likewise, actively powered lower-limb assistive devices have made great strides in their maturity, with hardware such as the Open-Source Leg broadening access for future breakthroughs. Despite this […]

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Physiologically Induced High Gaussian Curvature Drives Nuclear Lamina Rupture and Cytoskeletal Displacement—Contributing to Downstream Dysfunction” (Michael Tobin)

Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Dennis Discher are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Michael Tobin. Title: Physiologically Induced High Gaussian Curvature Drives Nuclear Lamina Rupture and Cytoskeletal Displacement—Contributing to Downstream Dysfunction   Date: Tuesday, November 7, 2023 Time: 10AM Location: Glandt Forum at the Singh Center. There […]

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Reversing Engineering the Anesthetic State: Insights from Behavior and CNS Circuit Cracking” (Andrzej Wasilczuk)

Jordan Medical Education Center, Room 505EW 3400 Civic Center Blvd

The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Max Kelz are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Andrzej Wasilczuk Reversing Engineering the Anesthetic State: Insights from Behavior and CNS Circuit Cracking November 7th, 1:30-2:30pm Jordan Medical Education Center, Room 505EW 3400 Civic Center Blvd Philadelphia, PA 19104 A hybrid option […]

ASSET Seminar: “The Future of Algorithm Auditing is Sociotechnical” (Danaë Metaxa, Penn)

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

ABSTRACT:  Algorithm audits are powerful tools for studying black-box systems without direct knowledge of those systems’ inner workings. While they have been effectively deployed to identify harms and biases in algorithmic content, algorithm audits’ narrow focus on technical components stop short of considering users themselves as integral and dynamic parts of the system, to be […]

Fall 2023 GRASP SFI: Margaret Coad, University of Notre Dame, “Soft and Continuum Robots for Unstructured Environments”

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 Soft and continuum robots have immense potential to assist humans with tasks that require navigation and manipulation in unstructured environments. In this talk, I present my group's research on the design, modeling, and control of a variety of […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Approximate symmetries in machine learning”

Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

In this talk, we explain different roles that symmetries and approximate symmetries can play in machine learning models. We define approximately equivariant graph neural networks and we show a bias-variance tradeoff when selecting the symmetries to enforce. We explain how to see equivariant functions as gradients of invariant functions, and we show how to use […]

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Mapping variable host gene expression states to viral infection” (Sam Reffsin)

Smilow Center for Translational Research in SCTR 11-146AB

The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Arjun Raj are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Sam Reffsin. Title: Mapping variable host gene expression states to viral infection Date: November 9, 2023 Time: 2:30pm-4:30pm Location: Smilow 11-146AB The public is welcome to attend.

CIS Seminar: “Intrinsic images, lighting and relighting without any labelling”

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

Intrinsic images are maps of surface properties. A classical problem is to recover an intrinsic image, typically a map of surface lightness, from an image.   The topic has mostly dropped from view, likely for three reasons: training data is mostly synthetic; evaluation is somewhat uncertain; and clear applications for the resulting albedo are missing. […]

CIS Seminar: “Intrinsic images, lighting and relighting without any labeling”

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

I will show the results of simple experiments that suggest that very good modern depth and normal predictors are strongly sensitive to lighting – if you relight a scene in a reasonable way, the reported depth will change. This is intolerable. To fix this problem, we need to be able to produce many different lightings […]

PRECISE Seminar: Evaluation and calibration of AI models with uncertain ground truth

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

For safety, AI systems in health undergo thorough evaluations before deployment, validating their predictions against a ground truth that is assumed certain. However, this is actually not the case and the ground truth may be uncertain. Unfortunately, this is largely ignored in standard evaluation of AI models but can have severe consequences such as overestimating […]