Events

This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT There are two dominant approaches to designing intelligent robots. One, typified by language behavior models, leverages unstructured deep neural networks and learning from demonstration to generate behavior. These approaches have had several impressive successes but face scaling, trust, and explainability challenges. The second […]

This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Robots in factories are still largely limited to structured environments with known object models. How can we bring robots into the more diverse, unstructured settings of our daily lives, where objects may be deformable or articulated and vary widely in shape and appearance, […]

This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Recent years have seen a transformation in artificial intelligence fueled by the convergence of machine learning models, internet-scale data, and large training infrastructures. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled unprecedented progress in aligned vision-language processing, while Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and deep reinforcement learning (RL) […]

This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT This talk surveys recent advances on contraction theory for dynamical systems, as a robust, computationally-friendly and modular stability theory. Starting from basic notions, I will present novel theoretical properties and examples of contracting dynamics, including gradient systems, controlled Lure' systems, constrained optimization solvers, […]