Theme: "Building an AI Ecosystem for a Brand New Generation of Computing" Section I: Leadership Lightning Insights Series Section II: Keynote Address Section III: Executive Panel Discussions
Abstract: Proper organism development relies on precise gene regulation, where genes are expressed at specific times, locations, and quantities. Non-coding DNA sequences called enhancers play a crucial role in this process by interacting with their target promoters to initiate transcription and regulate gene expression. While the mechanisms of enhancer-mediated gene control have been extensively studied, […]
Researchers have documented race and gender bias in STEM for decades, but there has been little parallel examination of LGBTQ status as an axis of inequality. How do LGBTQ-identifying STEM professionals fare in STEM? Drawing on data from her NSF-funded STEM Inclusion Study, which included surveys of over 25,000 STEM workers, Dr. Cech will discuss […]
When it comes to security, hardware is the new software. Starting some years ago, this shift was made plain when a litany of attacks, such as "Spectre/Meltdown" and "Rowhammer", shattered our confidence in processors as a root of trust. Making matters worse, modern processors are incredibly complex, and have (as it turns out) been designed […]
Foundation models including LLMs and multi-modal models released by OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), Meta (Llama), and others have shown very impressive capabilities across a range of tasks. Some key drivers of this performance — such as investments in GPUs/compute, model size, and pre-training data — are relatively well understood. This presentation will focus […]
Abstract: Metal oxides play a critical role in heterogeneous catalysis, acting as active catalysts in a wide range of reactions from dehydrogenation to selective and complete oxidation. However, many catalytically active metal oxides suffer from low surface areas in their bulk form, particularly after high-temperature calcination. This thesis focuses on cerium-based oxides due to their […]
Abstract: Foundation models are monolithic models that are trained on a broad set of data, and which are then in principle fine-tuned to various specific tasks. But they are ill-suited to many heterogeneous settings, for instance numeric tabular data, or numeric time-series data, where training a single monolithic model over a large collection of such […]
This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Despite all the interest and hype both from within and outside our community, robotics is a relatively new and highly specialized field. We embody substantial diversity in research direction and style, the focus and flavor of industrial […]
Abstract: Cobalt, nickel, and lithium are essential ingredients in today’s lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), but their continued use presents economic, ethical, and environmental challenges. Society must now begin to consider the implications of a LIB’s full life cycle, including the carbon footprint, the economic and environmental costs, and material access. These challenges motivate the case for […]
Many of the colors found in nature, such as those of iridescent, color-shifting organisms like beetles, butterflies, and birds, are structural colors. Structural coloration is often generated by optical interference occurring within nanoscale periodic structures, like diffraction gratings, photonic crystals, or thin films. In these cases, the periodicity of the structure is similar to the […]
Latent variable models have been an integral part of probabilistic machine learning, ranging from simple mixture models to variational autoencoders to powerful diffusion probabilistic models at the center of recent media attention. Perhaps less well-appreciated is the intimate connection between latent variable models and data compression, and the potential of these models for advancing natural […]
Cells use genetically-encoded molecular circuits to execute diverse biological functions. We are developing novel tools of synthetic biology that allow us to construct regulatory circuitry inside living cells that recapitulate complex functions like those seen in nature. In this talk, I will describe how we use this approach to achieve three objectives. First, I will […]