• CIS Seminar: “Cedar: A language for expressing fast, safe, and fine-grained authorization policies”

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

    Cedar is a new open-source authorization policy language, used to express fine-grained permissions on behalf of applications. Rather than embed authorization logic in their application code, developers can write that logic as Cedar policies and delegate access requests to Cedar’s evaluation engine. Cedar is designed to be ergonomic, fast, safe, and analyzable. Cedar’s simple and […]

    Fall 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Nicholas Roy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Hierarchy, Abstractions and Geometry”

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

    This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT In the last few years, the ability for robots to understand and operate in the world around them has advanced considerably. Examples include the growing number of self-driving car systems, the considerable work in robot mapping, […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Exploring Multimodal Sensing Across the Stack for Robot Manipulation”

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

    Despite substantial progress in robotics, achieving human-like manipulation remains a significant challenge. Existing robotic systems typically leverage human-inspired sensory modalities: vision, touch, and proprioception. However, these modalities are historically studied and integrated in isolation, leading to limited performance in complex real-world tasks that require sensing across multiple modalities for robust generalization. As a result, robots […]

    Center for Soft and Living Matter Seminar: “Medium-range Order and Local Structure Fluctuations in Metallic Glass”

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    DRL 2N3

    Amorphous materials have no long-range order, but there are ordered structures at short-range (2-5 Å), medium-range (5-20 Å), and even longer-length scales. While regular and semiregular polyhedra are often identified as short-range order in amorphous materials, the nature of the medium-range order has remained elusive. Because of the disorder, the dynamics also become far more […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Coupling Hard and Soft Interfaces to Realize Actuators and Energy Sources that Bring Robots Towards Animal Mobility”

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

    Mobile robots have shown significant advancements in agility, intelligence, and efficiency over the past few decades. However, their endurance and overall performance remain limited by the onboard power supplies. Current power sources typically restrict mobile robots to areas close to the electrical grid and necessitate heavier batteries for extended range. Energy refueling could be significantly […]

    Tedori-Callinan Distinguished Lecture: “Novel Passive and Active Approaches to Fluid Friction Reduction using Polymers & Plastrons”

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

    When a superhydrophobic (SH) textured surface is immersed in water it traps a thin shiny layer of air within the texture that is known as a plastron. Contact line pinning stabilizes this Cassie-Baxter state and the patches of air trapped in the texture can act as shear-free regions that locally lower the frictional dissipation. Recent […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “Color center photonics in silicon carbide: scalable fabrication, cryogenic experiments, and quantum simulation on NISQ testbeds”

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

    Color center systems are among the leading platforms in the development of quantum communication and quantum sensing hardware due to their desirable spin, optical, and spin-photon properties. Among them, the near infrared emitters in silicon carbide, such as the nitrogen-vacancy center in 4H-SiC, provide fiber-friendly operation in an industrially mature substrate, ideal for scalable deployment […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Impulse-Induced Nonlinear Dynamics of Flexible Mechanical Metamaterials”

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    Room 2C2, David Rittenhouse Laboratory Building 209 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Mechanical metamaterials are artificially designed structures that exhibit unique properties due to their internal structure rather than their composition, e.g., negative Poisson’s ratio, tunable stiffness, and advanced thermal characteristics. While the static properties of mechanical metamaterials have been widely studied, their nonlinear dynamics remain largely unexplored, which could pave ways for innovative design and optimization […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “Algorithmic Bias in Computer Vision – Generative Methods Enable the Experimental Approach”

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    As Artificial Intelligence (AI) finds increasing applications in industry and society. Responsible deployment demands that we measure and correct algorithmic biases vis-a-vis protected attributes such as sex, age and ethnicity. State of the art methods for measuring algorithmic bias rely on test sets that are collected in the wild and are then annotated for the […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Multi-Omic Approaches for Deciphering Cellular Heterogeneity and Plasticity in Cancer”

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

    Abstract: Tumors are complex and heterogeneous systems, which challenge their classification and treatment. The Silverbush lab decodes tumor heterogeneity and plasticity to understand how cancer cells transform to become more aggressive or evade treatment. We particularly examine hard-to-treat cancers with high heterogeneity, focusing on the notorious kings of heterogeneity and aggressiveness: brain cancers. To achieve this […]

    Introduction to COMSOL Multiphysics® Workshop

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    PICS Conference Room 534 - A Wing , 5th Floor 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    We are excited to announce that COMSOL will be coming to the University of Pennsylvania for a free special event. On November 13th at 2pm we will be providing a Introduction to COMSOL Multiphysics® Workshop on campus at 3401 Walnut Street Wing A, Conference Room 534, 5th Floor. At this workshop, you will see the […]

    Fall 2024 GRASP SFI: Noémie Jaquier, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, “The geometric side(s) of Lagrangian dynamics”

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

    This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. This week's speaker will be virtual.  ABSTRACT Lagrangian mechanics provides a powerful framework for modeling the dynamics of physical systems by inferring their motions based on energy conservation. This talk will explore recent advances in applying geometric perspectives, […]