Penn Engineering Events

ESE

  1. Events
  2. ESE

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

ESE Fall Seminar – “Tools for designing some exciting chips”

Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

There is an enormous interest in developing customized, domain-specific systems-on-a-chip.  Continued improvement in computing efficiency requires functional specialization of hardware designs. But designing complex chips is difficult.   This talk presents the Chipyard framework, an integrated SoC design, simulation, and implementation environment for specialized compute systems. Chipyard includes configurable, composable, open-source, generator-based IP blocks that can […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Large Observational Study of the Causal Effects of a Nudge and the Geometry of Causality”

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

Nudges are interventions promoting healthy behavior without forbidding options or significant incentives. As an example of a nudge, the Apple Watch encourages users to stand by delivering a notification if they have been sitting for the first 50 minutes of an hour. Based on 76 billion minutes of observational standing data from 160,000 subjects in […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Control of Multi-Contact Systems via Local Hybrid Models”

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

For many important tasks such as manipulation and locomotion, robots need to make and break contact with their environment. Although such multi-contact systems are common, they pose a significant challenge when it comes to analysis and control. This thesis exploits the local hybrid structure of such problems and presents scalable and fast algorithmic solutions. First, […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Agile Design of Domain-Specific Accelerators and Compilers”

Zoom - Meeting ID 990 7434 6805

With the slowing of Moore's law, computer architects have turned to domain-specific hardware accelerators to improve the performance and efficiency of computing systems. However, programming these systems entails significant modifications to the software stack to properly leverage the specialized hardware. Moreover, the accelerators become obsolete quickly as the applications evolve. What is needed is a […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Light matter interaction in low-dimensional semiconductors”

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

Light matter interaction holds significant relevance across a range of applications including lasing, sensing, communications, and computing. One prominent method for modulating optical properties is through the use of a Fabry-Perot cavity, which controls the photonic density of states within optical cavities. Additionally, plasmonic and high-contrast dielectric cavities represent a cutting-edge approach for photonic dispersion […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “CyberCardia: Patient-specific Electrophysiological heart model for assisting left atrium arrhythmia ablation”

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

Atrial arrhythmia is a prevalent heart disease that results in weak and irregular contractions of the atria. It affects millions of people worldwide. Cardiac ablation is among the most successful treatment options. During the procedure, catheters are inserted into the left atrium to map the atrium geometry and record endocardium electrograms that are then converted […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Acceleration by Stepsize Hedging”

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

Can we accelerate convergence of gradient descent without changing the algorithm --- just by optimizing stepsizes? Surprisingly, we show that the answer is yes. Our proposed Silver Stepsize Schedule optimizes strongly convex functions in $k^{\log_p 2} = k^{0.7864}$ iterations, where $p=1+\sqrt{2}$ is the silver ratio and $k$ is the condition number. This is intermediate between […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Quantum sensing and imaging with diamond spins”

Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Solid state spin qubits, in particular the nitrogen vacancy (NV) center in diamond, offer a path towards truly nanoscale imaging of condensed matter and biological systems with sensitivity to single nuclear spins. Here I discuss our NV-based magnetic imaging experiments as applied to condensed matter systems, where we have imaged current flow patterns in graphene […]

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 […]

MSE Seminar: “Turbo-charging Silicon: Do we have the materials and devices?” (Deep Jariwala) University of Pennsylvania

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

Silicon has been the dominant material for electronic computing for decades and very likely will stay dominant for the foreseeable future. However, it is well-known that Moore’s law that propelled Silicon into this dominant position is long dead.  Therefore, a fervent search for (i) new semiconductors that could directly replace silicon or (ii) new architectures […]