ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Chemical vapor deposition synthesis of graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides and their applications”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

2D materials is a rapidly expanding class of materials that have captivated academia and industry with their ultrathin nature and remarkable properties. Graphene, the first discovered material, shows exceptional mechanical strength and superior electrical properties, presenting exciting probabilities in many applications. Combined with its large surface area and biocompatibility, graphene is particularly promising for the […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “A Robot’s Search for Meaning: Semantics as a Common Representation for Heterogeneous Robot State Estimation and Collaboration”

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

Mapping and navigation have gone hand-in-hand since long before robots existed. For almost as long, maps have also been a key form of communication, allowing someone who has never been to an area to nonetheless navigate that area successfully. In the context of multi-robot systems, the maps and information that flow between robots are what […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Discrete and Continuous Optimization for Collaborative and Multi-task Learning”

Room 452 C, 3401 Walnut 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

This thesis is dedicated to addressing the challenges of robust collaborative learning and optimization in both discrete and continuous domains. With the ever-increasing scale of data and the growing demand for effective distributed learning, a multitude of obstacles emerge, including communication limitations, resilience to failures and corrupted data, limited information access, and collaboration in multi-task […]

Penn American Red Cross Blood Drive

Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall 3417 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA, United States

There is currently a critical need for blood donors, and members of the Penn Engineering community are invited to participate in a school-wide blood drive. To join in this effort, please RSVP using this link.

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Software/Hardware Co-optimization for Computer Systems with 3D-stacking Memories”

Moore 317 200 S 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Emerging 3D memory technologies, such as the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), provide high bandwidth and massive memory-level parallelism. With the growing heterogeneity and complexity of computer systems (CPU cores and accelerators, etc.), efficiently integrating emerging memories into existing systems poses new challenges to both algorithm, hardware and system. This dissertation […]

Nano Seminar: “Conductive Nitrides for Plasmonics in the Visible Region: Properties and Applications”

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

Plasmonic nanostructure based on silver and gold that produces LSPR to withstand ultrahigh temperatures without damage remains a great challenge for future ultra-compact integrated circuits, and high-power enabled photonic devices. In principle, the shapes of plasmonic nanostructures containing noble metals would change after the heat treatment that altered the plasmonic resonance. Thus, discovering refractory plasmonic […]

MEAM Seminar: “Vibrating Beam MEMS Accelerometers for Gravity and Seismic Measurements”

Towne 337

Advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have enabled the widespread development of sensors for a variety of consumer, automotive, and wearable healthcare electronics applications. However, there is increasing interest in the development of highly accurate MEMS inertial sensors for a variety of emerging applications, for e.g., navigation systems for pedestrians and autonomous vehicles, and seismic and […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Josephson parametric amplifiers for rapid, high-fidelity measurement of solid-state qubits”

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

Quantum physics puts a limit on how small the noise added by an amplifier can be. Limiting this extra noise, which causes unavoidable signal degradation, is an essential requirement for the measurement of weak electromagnetic signals in various areas of science and engineering. In particular, a nearly-quantum-limited microwave amplifier is a key tool for performing […]

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: “Toward High-performance Simple Models of Legged Locomotion”

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

This thesis addresses the challenges of model-based planning and control in legged locomotion, particularly the trade-off between computational speed and robot performance presented by different levels of model complexities. Full-order models, while rich in detail, are often too computationally demanding for real time planning, whereas conventional reduced-order models (ROMs) tend to oversimplify the dynamics, limiting […]

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 […]