• ESE & CIS Spring Seminar – “Beyond the black box: characterizing and improving how neural networks learn”

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

    The predominant paradigm in deep learning practice treats neural networks as "black boxes". This leads to economic and environmental costs as brute-force scaling remains the performance driver, and to safety issues as robust reasoning and alignment remain challenging. My research opens up the neural network black box with mathematical and statistical analyses of how networks […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Enforcing Right to Explanation: Algorithmic Challenges and Opportunities” (Himabindu Lakkaraju, Harvard University)

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

    ABSTRACT: As predictive and generative models are increasingly being deployed in various high-stakes applications in critical domains including healthcare, law, policy and finance, it becomes important to ensure that relevant stakeholders understand the behaviors and outputs of these models so that they can determine if and when to intervene. To this end, several techniques have […]

    Spring 2024 GRASP SFI: Fei Miao, University of Connecticut, “Learning and Control for Safety, Efficiency, and Resiliency of Embodied AI”

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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. ABSTRACT With rapid evolution of sensing, communication, and computation, integrating learning and control presents significant Embodied AI opportunities. However, current decision-making frameworks lack comprehensive understanding of the tridirectional relationship among communication, learning and control, posing challenges for multi-agent […]

    CBE Seminar: “Systems Engineering for Addressing Critical Challenges in Viral Vector Manufacturing” (Francesco Destro, MIT)

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

    Abstract The demand for viral vectors is poised to soon exceed current production capacities, driven by the surging number of clinical trials for gene and cell therapies. Unfortunately, current manufacturing processes for viral vectors have high costs and low titers. This talk will demonstrate how process systems engineering tools can be leveraged for addressing the […]

    ESE Spring Seminar – “White-Box Computational Imaging: Measurements to Images to Insights”

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

    Computation and machine learning hold tremendous potential to improve the quality and capabilities of imaging methods used across science, medicine, engineering, and art. Despite their impressive performance on benchmark datasets, however, deep learning methods are known to behave unpredictably on some real-world data, which limits their trusted adoption in safety-critical domains. Accordingly, in this talk […]

    BE Seminar: “Where Do Therapeutic Antibodies Go?: A First-In-Human Journey” (Guolan Lu, Stanford)

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

    Dr. Lu will introduce a fluorescence molecular imaging method to track therapeutic antibody delivery from cancer patients in vivo, down to single cells, through first-in-human clinical trials. She will present a new experimental and AI-powered analytical framework that integrates single-cell drug imaging with spatial omics to decipher drug-target-microenvironment in situ. This work establishes a foundational […]

    CIS Seminar: “Accessible Foundation Models: Systems, Algorithms, and Science”

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

    The ever-increasing scale of foundation models, such as ChatGPT and AlphaFold, has revolutionized AI and science more generally. However, increasing scale also steadily raises computational barriers, blocking almost everyone from studying, adapting, or otherwise using these models for anything beyond static API queries. In this talk, I will present research that significantly lowers these barriers […]

    Spring 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Guillaume Sartoretti, National University of Singapore, “Towards Learned Cooperation at Scale in Robotic Multi-Agent Systems”

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

    This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT With the recent advances in sensing, actuation, computation, and communication, the deployment of large numbers of robots is becoming a promising avenue to enable or speed up complex tasks in areas such as manufacturing, last-mile delivery, search-and-rescue, […]

    CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Controlled Deposition of Cargo-Carrying Colloids from Dispersed Liquid to Solid Surfaces” (Paradorn Rummaneethorn)

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    Towne 337

    Abstract: Great advances have been made in encapsulation of (biological) analytes at extremely high throughput via techniques such as microfluidics and/or conjugation. In parallel, analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry have advanced to analyze biochemical components of complex mixtures with high resolutions. Both capabilities are essential for enabling biology at subcellular scales; rather than engineering […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Precision Engineering in Health and Medicine via Acoustics”

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

    Precision engineering stands at the forefront of catalyzing transformative advancements in health and medicine. Among various precise techniques utilizing phototactic, electric, and magnetic mechanisms, acoustic devices have captured heightened attention for their capability to facilitate contactless, label-free, and biocompatible manipulation of cells, extracellular vesicles, and organisms. Demonstrating proficiency in manipulating micro/nano-objects across a diverse spectrum, […]

    CIS Seminar: “Towards Flexible, Scalable, and Knowledgeable Generative Intelligence”

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

    From language modeling to 3D vision, generative AI has revolutionized nearly every aspect of machine learning. In this talk, I will examine the limitations of the foundation behind many generative AI techniques–autoregressive models. Despite their impressive successes, these token-by-token models face various challenges, including 1). non-flexible computation during generation, 2). lack of rich inner structures […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Mathematical Foundations for Physical Agents” (Max Simchowitz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL)

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

    ABSTRACT: From robotics to autonomous vehicles, machine learning agents deployed in the physical world (“physical agents”) promise to revolutionize endeavors ranging from manufacturing to agriculture to domestic labor. In this talk, we will develop mathematical foundations, from the ground up, for how to carry out this vision. We will begin our investigation by examining linear […]