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    • MEAM Seminar: “Taking Advantage of Coherent Vortex Wakes: Formation Flight and High Density Tidal Energy Harvesting”

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

    Wake flows - the fluid mechanical "debris" shed behind an aerodynamic body - are often characterized by unsteady, turbulent, low-momentum fluid. Usually these wakes are to be avoided, but in several situations the wake can exhibit an organized structure consisting of well-defined high energy vortices. Examples of these coherent, or structured, wakes include trailing vortex […]

    • ASSET Seminar: “Title TBD”

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, United States

    Abstract TBD   Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98963621993

    Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Binghao Huang, Columbia University, “Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation”

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

    This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.  ABSTRACT Tactile and visual perception are crucial for fine-grained human interactions with the environment. Developing similar multimodal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation skills. This talk presents a scalable tactile stack that couples flexible, […]

    MSE Seminar: “Quantum Technologies with Atom-Light Interaction” Chuanwei Zhang – Washington University in St. Louis

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

    From knotted cords to contemporary computers, the revolution in information technologies has been a major driving force of human civilization. Since its emergence in the early 1900s, quantum mechanics has played a foundational role in enabling many transformative technologies—such as lasers and transistors—that are now recognized as hallmarks of the first quantum revolution. Over the […]

    FOLDS seminar: Theory and practice of LLM quantization

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 306 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722   Modern LLMs process information by repeatedly applying a basic primitive of matrix multiplication. Estimates show that about 60-84% of the energy consumed by LLMs goes into memory load/store operations. How can we reduce this power consumption? Tokens start as about 16-bit integers but get mapped to vectors of floats of length […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Jiatao Gu, University of Pennsylvania, “Towards Robust World Models”

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

    This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Autonomous agents need a world model that explains observations, predicts what comes next, and chooses actions over long horizons. Think of catching a ball: the robot must infer where it is now and where it will be next—even when it slips out of […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Microscopic Surface Electrochemical Actuators for Voltage-Tunable Optical Elements”

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    Brand Details

    Surface electrochemical actuators (SEAs) harness ion-induced surface stress changes to produce large bending deformations at the microscale. They have previously been applied in microrobot locomotion and microbattery validation, demonstrating their versatility as low-voltage microscopic actuators. Here, we extend their functionality by showing that ultra-thin platinum membranes (10 nm thick, 10–100 µm wide), fabricated via low-temperature […]

    PICS Colloquium: Flow and heat transfer over rough walls: fundamental physics, numerical simulations, and bulk parametrizations with Elie Bou-Zeid

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

    Understanding the physical processes modulating the transport of scalars, such as heat, over very rough surfaces is essential for understanding the thermal environment of cities, how wind and solar farms modify heat and water exchanges between the atmosphere and Earth surface, and parameterizing surface physics in coarser Earth systems models. This talk examines this problem […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Self-assembly of Colloidal Diamond by Multiple Routes”

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

    There has been considerable interest in the colloidal self-assembly of photonic crystals with a diamond structure, owing to their exceptional optical properties, such as a wide photonic bandgap and relative insensitivity to disorder. These materials are valuable for applications in optical circuits, low-threshold lasers, sensors, and solar cells. Given the three-dimensional nature of photonic crystals, […]

    CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Exploring Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation Across Length Scales: From Atomistic Bias Potentials To Phase-Field Models” (Alexander M. Johnson)

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 306 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Abstract: Liquid–liquid phase separation is a fundamental thermodynamic process that governs structure and function in biological systems, chemical separations, and multiphase materials. Within this broad field, computational studies play a critical role in advancing understanding of this phenomenon by enabling investigation of phase behavior across multiple length scales. In this thesis, liquid–liquid phase separation is […]

    CIS Seminar: “Reliable and Socially Aligned LLMs: Are We There Yet?”

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

    Large language models (LLMs) are powerful but not yet reliable: they hallucinate, misalign with human values, and struggle with social reasoning. In this talk, I will trace a path from diagnosing failure modes such as hallucinations, to uncovering the pitfalls of aligning models with noisy human preferences and diverse values, and finally to emerging frontiers […]