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    • MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Bio-inspired Architected Materials/structures with Enhanced Failure Characteristics”

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    Towne 319 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, United States

    Structural failure is a critically important design consideration in many engineering applications. Nature provides a number of interesting examples of lightweight structural features that exhibit outstanding failure characteristics. Recent progress in additive manufacturing has facilitated precise control over geometric features, allowing for the implementation of bio-inspired structural designs on a layer-by-layer basis. In this thesis, […]

    Energy Week: Joseph Bordogna Forum

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

    "Creating Lasting Impact at the Interface of Energy, Technology, and Society" Join Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering for a discussion with David Turk – the former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy and Vanessa Chan, the former Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the Office of Technology Transitions at the […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Flow Architectures, From Capillary Networks to Blood Transport through Organs”

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

    Flow systems in nature, whether animate or inanimate, have evolved in time toward greater efficiency by adapting, or ‘morphing’, their configuration to decrease resistance to the currents flowing through them. Observations at various scales indicate that the distribution of flow, i.e. the connection of a point (source/sink) to a volume (sink/source) or vice-versa, is the […]

    ESE Spring Seminar – “Machine Learning: Algorithmic and Economic Perspectives”

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

    Algorithms are increasingly integrated into various societal applications, often directly interacting with people and communities. This highlights the importance of understanding the interplay between algorithmic decisions and economic incentives when designing machine learning algorithms. In this talk, I will explore two examples of this dynamic through the lens of privacy in data markets and fairness […]

    Energy Week: “Catalyzing Clean Energy Investments in the Private Sector: The Role of the Federal Government”

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    Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    In this panel, senior members of the Biden-Harris Administration will discuss the work they did to catalyze the private sector to commercialize critical technologies for the clean energy transition. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) created over 900,000 new jobs, catalyzed over 900 new and […]

    CIS Seminar: “Leveraging the Wisdom of Clouds for Internet Security”

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

    Over the past decade, networked systems have consolidated under just a handful of hyperscale cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure). While this offers logistical and economic advantages, attackers specifically target providers and their customers, a shift that has left traditional network vantage points blind to the most sophisticated adversaries. In this talk, I’ll explore how we […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Beyond Scaling: Frontiers of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models”

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

    Abstract: Large Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by scaling up training data and model sizes. However, they continue to face critical challenges, including hallucinations and outdated knowledge, which particularly limit their reliability in expert domains such as scientific research and software development. In this talk, I will urge the necessity of moving beyond […]

    CBE Seminar: “Genetically Encodable Designer Biomaterials” (Shunzhi Wang, University of Washington)

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    Abstract: Nature harnesses genetic sequences to encode structural information and emergent physical and chemical transformations required by life processes. Such orchestration is achieved through hierarchical self-assemblies driven by weak molecular interactions and optimized via evolution. However, emulating this level of programmability to create designer biomolecular materials remains a grand challenge. In this seminar, I will […]

    Energy Week: Viewing of Legion 44 Documentary Film

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

    Vanessa Chan, the Jonathan and Linda Brassington Practice Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Vice Dean of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Penn Engineering, is hosting the premiere of the documentary Legion 44. Special guests include Leila Conners, the film’s director and producer, and Dr. Max Pisciotta, a featured climate scientist in the film […]

    CBE & VIEST Joint Seminar: “Lignin Conversion to Performance-advantaged Fuels, Chemicals, and Polymers” (Gregg Beckham, NREL)

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    Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Room 121 231 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Abstract: Terrestrial plants harbor renewable carbon resources in their cell walls that can directly contribute to decarbonization of the transportation and materials sectors, but the heterogeneous, aromatic lignin polymer found in plants has long obstructed both natural- and humankind-driven endeavors to deconstruct plant biomass to valuable products. However, viable methods to valorize lignin are essential […]

    Energy Week: “Climate 101: Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence”

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    Annenberg School for Communication, Room 300 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    The Environmental Innovations Initiative's Climate 101 series demystifies climate change and its link with a diversity of disciplines. Experts from across Penn share how they think about climate through the lens of their research and teaching, helping to raise our climate literacy and prepare us to tackle one of the planet's greatest challenges: the climate […]

    IDEAS/STAT Optimization Seminar: “Foundations of Deep Learning: Optimization and Representation Learning”

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

    Deep learning's success stems from the ability of neural networks to automatically discover meaningful representations from raw data. In this talk, I will describe some recent insights into how optimization enables this learning process. First, I will show how optimization algorithms exhibit surprisingly rich dynamics when training neural networks, and how these complex dynamics are […]