Spring 2023 Hybrid-Seminar Series Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST) Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge “For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu>”
Please save the date to join us for this annual distinguished lecture. The Joseph Bordogna Forum will foster conversation and debate regarding important issues at the nexus of technology and society. It will feature lectures and panel discussions on a wide range of contemporary issues that are central to engineering including diversity and inclusion, the […]
While lithium (Li) ion battery technology has had major successes, at the current rate of progress, it is unlikely to meet the mid-century global demands related to full de-carbonization and interruption of fossil fuel usage for transportation and energy generation. The replacement of currently used anodes by Li metal is one of the most promising […]
Topological materials are solid-state compounds that have atypical charge carriers, often acting analogously to particles in high-energy physics. They are significant for both fundamental and applied science, with potential uses in spintronics, catalysis, and quantum information science. But despite the great promise of this field, the majority of known topological materials conform to the same […]
Attention BE Master's Students! We want your thoughts on the job search! Sign up for this upcoming focus group to give us your opinion on industries of interest, employers & recruiting events. Register now: http://tinyurl.com/bdzz8cna. Contact Lauren Kemp with any questions: laurem@seas.upenn.edu
ABSTRACT: Electronic health records (EHRs) offer great promises in advancing clinical research and transforming learning health systems. However, complex, temporal EHRs are fraught with biases and present daunting analytical challenges that, if not addressed, can exacerbate health inequities. EHRs data, recorded at irregular time intervals with varying frequencies, are multi-modal and multi-scale including structured data […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT While it is tempting to view robotics as a nail that can be solved with the deep learning hammer, we have seen that deep-learning based perception and action pipelines for […]
Abstract: Blood vessels constitute one of the most complex and most essential biological systems, sometimes referred to as a separate organ. Endothelial cells, lining blood vessels are also one of the most 'plastic' cell types, capable of a wide range of responses to external stimuli, conditioned on their internal states and micro-environment. Strikingly, many of […]
Efficient learning for stochastic control and estimation remains a topic of high interest in a variety of disciplines and there are well-known advantages and disadvantages to both model-free and model-based learning. On one hand, it is becoming increasingly more feasible to rely entirely on model-free/data-driven methods for controlling complex stochastic systems, but a well-known issue […]
The development of stronger and tougher materials serving under extreme conditions is a long-term goal of materials research that has been made even more urgent recently by our quests for space exploration and energy sustainability. Recently, the advent of alloys with increased complexity, e.g., multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs), additively manufactured (AM) alloys, and alloys with […]
Rapidly growing renewable generations and peak loads pose a serious threat to the security and reliability of modern power and energy systems. A critical question is "how to accommodate a high penetration of renewable generation and deep electrification?". This talk focuses on two key challenges, i.e., unknown information and the scalability issue of coordinating large-scale […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT My long-term research goal is enable real robots to manipulate any kind of object such that they can perform many different tasks in a wide variety of application […]
Creating thick electrodes with low porosity can dramatically increase the available energy in a single cell and decrease the number of electrode stacks needed in a full battery, which results in higher energy, lower cost, and easier to manufacture batteries. However, existing electrode architectures cannot simultaneously achieve thick electrodes with high active material volume fractions […]
The unabated pursuit for omniscient and omnipotent AI is levying hefty latency, memory, and energy taxes at all computing scales. At the same time, the end of Dennard scaling is sunsetting traditional performance gains commonly attained with reduction in transistor feature size. Faced with these challenges, my research is building a heterogeneity of solutions co-optimized […]
Spring 2023 Hybrid-Seminar Series Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST) Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge “For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu>”
Control over the microscopic world, at the scale of the smallest organisms, depends on the development of robots and machines that can operate at micro-nanoscales. However, fundamental limitations in the efficient miniaturization of macro-scale robotic technologies require bioinspired/hybrid approaches for actuation, sensing, and control of microrobots. Recent advances in materials, fabrication and actuation technologies have […]
Wearable robots and devices—garments with embedded elements that actuate to change shape or apply forces to the wearer, typically based on signals from integrated sensors—offer promise for assistive and augmentative applications including rehabilitative gloves, haptic devices, and dynamically thermoregulating clothing. Early iterations of wearables from the 50s and 60s primarily took the form of rigid […]
Scaling applications with distributed execution has become the norm. With the rise of big data and machine learning, more and more developers must build applications that involve complex and data-intensive distributed processing. In this talk, I will discuss the design of a general-purpose distributed execution system that can serve as a common platform for such […]
ABSTRACT: How can A.I.-based methods inform social listening applications during public health crises? The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted the mode and method of human communication and interaction. The magnitude of the pandemic has led to an ‘infodemic’ along with considerable increase in stress and anxiety across communities. At the same time, the use of social […]
Abstract: Chemical synthesis is responsible for significant emissions of carbon dioxide worldwide. These emissions arise not only due to the energy requirements of chemical synthesis, but since hydrocarbon feedstocks can be overoxidized or used as hydrogen sources. Using renewable electricity to drive chemical synthesis may provide a route to overcoming these challenges, enabling synthetic routes […]
Moiré superlattices of two-dimensional (2D) materials are an emerging platform for studying new physical phenomena with high tunability. Strong excitonic responses in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) allow optical access to the wealth of physics. In this talk, I will present our recent results about interactions between excitons and charge carriers trapped in moiré potentials. We […]
The decline of Moore's law and an increasing reliance on computation has led to an explosion of specialized software packages and hardware architectures. While this diversity enables unprecedented flexibility, it also requires domain-experts to learn how to customize programs to efficiently leverage the latest platform-specific API's and data structures, instead of working on their intended […]
As networked systems become critical infrastructure, their design must reflect their new societal role. Today, we build systems with hundreds of heuristics but often do not understand their inherent and emergent behaviors. I will present a set of tools and techniques to prove performance properties of heuristics running in real-world conditions. Rigorous proofs can not […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT Autonomous systems of the near future have the potential to impact and improve our lives in unprecedented ways. As an example, an autonomous taxi service can be instructed […]
Presented by Penn Engineering's Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (ODEI) , the Underrepresented Student Advisory Board in Engineering (USABE), the Penn chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Penn chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), and the Penn Society of Women Engineers (SWE), the gathering will include remarks […]
Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) is a type of immunotherapy that involves the processing of blood from a donor to isolate immune cells (e.g. T cells) for genetic manipulation followed by reinfusion of the cells into patients. Specifically for CAR T cell therapy, genetic coding material (e.g. DNA, mRNA) is inserted into the T cells to […]
Spring 2023 Hybrid-Seminar Series Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST) Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge “For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu>”
Personalized medicine as an emerging solution for health problems is leveraged by advanced manufacturing technologies. Personalized medical devices, tissue grafts, biomonitoring systems, and precision medicine are customized based on each patient’s needs and health background. However, the current manufacturing techniques are challenged when it comes to fabricating architected structures with complex designs. Additive manufacturing has […]
From superconductivity to fractionalized particles, fascinating phenomena arise in quantum materials due to the collective behaviors of electrons. These quantum effects challenge our understanding of nature and open up new possibilities for future technologies in quantum information. In my talk, I will discuss the use of van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures to create new quantum […]
Attention BE Master’s Students! We want your thoughts on the job search! Sign up for this upcoming focus group to give us your opinion on industries of interest, employers & recruiting events. Register now: http://tinyurl.com/bdzz8cna. Contact Lauren Kemp with any questions: laurem@seas.upenn.edu
Launched in May 2021, the Future Leaders in Mechanobiology is a monthly seminar series featuring up-and-coming leaders in mechanobiology–PhD students and postdocs from a wide range of fields, backgrounds, and institutions. By providing an international stage to share one’s work and opportunities to interact with researchers at all career stages, we aim to create an inclusive and […]
ABSTRACT: Building robust decision making systems for autonomous systems is challenging. Decisions must be made based on imperfect information about the environment and with uncertainty about how the environment will evolve. In addition, these systems must carefully balance safety with other considerations, such as operational efficiency. Typically, the space of edge cases is vast, placing a large […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT While it is tempting to view robotics as a nail that can be solved with the deep learning hammer, we have seen that deep-learning based perception and action pipelines for […]
As nanotechnology plays essential parts in developing of high performance or new concepts of electrical and optical devices, new class of nanomaterials has emerged to beat conventional optical and electronic devices. Mixed-dimensional hetero-interfaces consisting of low-dimensional material components, have been the focus of ongoing research efforts to surpass Si-based device and to explore excitonic nano-optical […]
Providing safety and performance guarantees for motion planning and control algorithms is a well-studied problem for robotic systems with well-known dynamics that operate in structured environments. However, when robots operate in a real-world setting where the environment is dynamic and unstructured, common assumptions used to develop the planning algorithms are no longer valid and consequently, […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT New Horizons Studio is a team that is focused on the design, technology, and engineering of ultimate mobility vehicles. NHS believes that the combination of robotics and car […]
Spring 2023 Hybrid-Seminar Series Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST) Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge “For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu>”
Many human health problems are associated with alteration of tissue mechanics and often require mechanical stimulation to promote the healing process. While it is now well established that the mechanics of the cellular microenvironment regulate various biological processes, most studies have focused only on the effect of stiffness, leaving other mechanical parameters such as viscoelasticity […]
Two-dimensional (2D) materials offer a rich platform for studying quantum phenomena, because their properties can be profoundly altered through heterostructure stacking and defect manipulation, while the resulting electronic and magnetic structure can be directly imaged via surface-sensitive probes. I will discuss several examples that highlight the remarkable potential of engineered two-dimensional (2D) materials for exploring […]
Quadcopters are among the most agile and dynamic machines ever created. In this talk, I’ll show how data-driven sensorimotor controllers can push quadcopters with only onboard sensing and computation to their physical limits. Such controllers enable quadcopters to fly faster and more agile than what was possible before in unstructured environments like cities, forests, and […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Pablo Camara are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Rachael Aubin. Title: UNDERSTANDING THE CELLULAR AND GENE-REGULATORY MECHANISMS UNDERLYING THE MESENCHYMAL TRANSITION OF EPENDYMOMA TUMOR CELLS USING OMICS DATA Date: Wednesday, March 29 Time: 9:30am Location: Reunion Auditorium, John Morgan Building Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/97229075338 The public […]
ABSTRACT: An important goal of the field sensorimotor robot learning is to do away with cumbersome expertise-intensive task specification, so that general-purpose robots of the future might learn large numbers of new skills. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work on algorithms that exploit goals as a versatile and accessible task specification interface. Goals might […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT A key challenge to the widespread deployment of robotic manipulators is the need to ensure safety in arbitrary environments while generating new motion plans in real-time. This talk describes a […]
Structural materials that are damage tolerant, lightweight, multifunctional, and sustainable are highly desirable for many engineering applications. Such combinations of properties are often found in the biological world. Organisms from nature construct a variety of different biological structural materials for protection, predation, body support, camouflage, etc. Despite the fact that these materials are made from […]
Autonomous exploration and data-efficient learning are important ingredients for helping machine learning handle the complexity and variety of real-world interactions. In this talk, I will describe methods that provide these ingredients and serve as building blocks for enabling self-sufficient robot learning. First, I will outline a family of methods that facilitate active global exploration. Specifically, […]
This seminar will be held in person only; snacks will be provided. Immunomodulatory therapies have advanced to clinical trials over the past decade for the treatment of a range of diseases and disorders, from cancer to diabetes to transplant rejection. However, the efficacy of these therapies remains limited, as challenges associated with off-target drug toxicity, […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT Robots are getting smarter at converting complex natural language commands describing household tasks into step-wise instructions. Yet, they fail to actually perform such tasks! A prominent explanation for these […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Berger Auditorium (Skirkanich Floor B) and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week's presenter will be in-person as well. ABSTRACT This talk will summarize key recent advances in autonomous surface and aerial mobility for Mars exploration, then discuss potential future missions and technology needs for Mars […]
