MSE Lab Safety Seminar
2020-09-03 10:45 - 11:45 (America/New_York)
Join us for a seminar lead by Kimi Brown, Sr. Lab Safety Specialist and Chemical Hygiene Officer for Penn Environmental Health and Radiation Safety, on laboratory safety and best COVID-19 practices. This seminar is mandatory for all MSE Master’s and PhD students.
Please register in advance here to obtain the Zoom link for this seminar.

MEAM Seminar: "U.S. Army Additive Manufacturing Materials and Technologies"
2020-09-08 10:30 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
With the constantly changing threat environment, the Army needs to be able to quickly adapt their tactics and equipment. But burdensome and lengthy acquisition cycles make this challenging. Additive manufacturing can potentially be utilized to overcome many of the challenges and enables on-demand manufacturing of repair parts, as well as rapid prototyping.
Through topology optimization, parts can be designed lighter and/or stronger and more cost-effective. In addition to new technologies being explored such as hybrid manufacturing in which entire metal and plastic devices can be fabricated within the same piece of equipment, a host of novel feedstocks are being developed such as multi-material thermoplastics and filled resins that further increase the range of properties and applications of the 3D printed parts. In addition to the research performed in Army laboratories, one of the thrusts of Army additive manufacturing research is the ability to manufacture at the point of need in remote environments. Research at the US Army Research Laboratory Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC-ARL) has shown that agile, expeditionary manufacturing could be accomplished through the use of materials at or near to the location of our operating bases. These materials could include not only commercial feedstocks, but also the organic and inorganic materials naturally occurring in the area and recycled materials from the operating bases such as polymers, metals, and paper materials. Recently, most of the ARL AM focus is in materials for energetics including high solids filled composites, custom alloys and hybrid materials. This seminar will present a brief overview of the organization, goals and AM programs, and then discuss in more detail the polymer-related AM efforts.

ESE Seminar: "Skin Interfaced Wearable Sweat Biosensors"
2020-09-08 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email ESE for Link jbatter@seas.upenn.edu
Abstract: The rising research interest in personalized medicine promises to revolutionize traditional medical practices. This presents a tremendous opportunity for developing wearable devices toward predictive analytics and treatment. In this talk, I will introduce our recent advances in developing fully-integrated skin-interfaced flexible biosensors for non-invasive molecular analysis. Such wearable biosensors can continuously, selectively, and accurately measure a wide spectrum of sweat analytes including metabolites, electrolytes, hormones, drugs, and other small molecules. These devices also allow us to gain real-time insight into the sweat secretion and gland physiology. The clinical value of our wearable sensing platforms is evaluated through multiple human studies involving both healthy and patient populations toward physiological monitoring, disease diagnosis, and drug monitoring. This talk will also feature our very recent works on laser-engraved lab on the skin and biofuel powered battery-free electronic skin toward metabolic/nutritional management as well as dynamic stress monitoring. These wearable and flexible devices could open the door to a wide range of personalized monitoring, diagnostic, and therapeutic applications.

CIS Seminar: "Embodied perception in-the-wild"
2020-09-08 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom – Email CIS for link, cherylh@cis.upenn.edu
Computer vision is undergoing a period of rapid progress, rekindling the relationship between perception, action, and cognition. Such connections may be best practically explored in the context of autonomous robots. In this talk, I will discuss perceptual understanding tasks motivated by embodied robots “in-the-wild”, focusing on the illustrative case of autonomous vehicles. I will argue that many challenges that surface are not well-explored in contemporary computer vision. These include streaming computation with bounded resources, generalization via spatiotemporal grouping, online behavioral forecasting, and self-aware processing that can recognize anomalous out-of-sample data. I will conclude with a description of open challenges for embodied perception in-the-wild.

MSE Seminar: "Approaching the Intrinsic Limit in Transition Metal Dichalcogenide van der Waals Heterostructures"
2020-09-10 10:45 - 11:45
Studying the intrinsic behavior 2D materials requires attention to both external and internal sources of disorder. This talk will first review the techniques used to create clean heterostructures with hBN to reduce environmental disorder. In graphene, ten years of progress has led to device performance now rivaling he highest-quality GaAs-based heterostructures. On the other hand, semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are also limited by atomic defects within the crystalline layers, which requires efforts in synthesis and characterization of high purity crystals. This talk will present recent progress in synthesis of TMD crystals with dramatically lower defect density using a self-flux technique. Combining higher crystal quality and clean encapsulation allows observation of greatly enhanced optical properties, including near-unity photoluminescence quantum yield, and long excited-state lifetime in TMD heterostructures. In addition, electronic transport measurements show improved carrier mobility and reveal many new details in magnetotransport measurements, including observation of fractional quantum Hall states in monolayer TMDs. These high-quality crystals also allow studies of twisted bilayer TMDs, which show the emergence of many-body correlated states.
Please register in advance for this seminar here.

BE Seminar: "Stem Cell Fate is a Touchy Subject" (Quinton Smith)
2020-09-10 15:00 - 16:00
This event will be held on zoom – check email for link and passcode. Contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu with any questions.
The success of regenerative cell therapy relies on the integration of a functional vascular system within the redeveloping tissue, to mediate the exchange of oxygen, nutrients and waste. Although the advent of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) has accelerated progress towards this goal, owing to their potential to generate clinically relevant scales of patient-specific cells, techniques to drive their specification mainly rely on chemical cues. In this seminar, I will discuss engineering strategies to control the complex stem cell extracellular milieu, emphasizing the importance of mechanical cues during hiPSC development, specification and downstream functionality as it relates to vascular differentiation.

MEAM Seminar: "Tackling Energy Sector Challenges with Interdisciplinary Research and Education Initiatives"
2020-09-15 10:30 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
Tackling the energy sector’s pressing technological and workforce needs requires a multi-pronged approach. This talk will include a discussion of both technical research and educational approaches to address these needs. The educational initiatives include implementation of the Energy Fellows Program, a training and professional development program, as well as research on the varying perceptions of students, faculty, and practicing engineers about what skills and knowledge are required for careers in the energy sector. The technical research focuses on conversion of waste heat into electricity since the majority of energy resources are wasted as heat. Thermoelectric power generators can convert waste heat into useful electrical energy, but traditional thermoelectric device manufacturing uses bulk material processing with machining, assembly, and integration steps which lead to material waste and performance limitations. The traditional manufacturing approach offers virtually no flexibility in designing the geometry of thermoelectric modules. Additive manufacturing can overcome these challenges. This presentation will describe our progress in laser-based additive manufacturing of thermoelectric materials such as tellurides and silicides. Laser powder bed fusion (also known as selective laser melting) is an additive manufacturing process which locally melts successive layers of material powder to construct three-dimensional objects. When applied to thermoelectric materials, this technique could enable new geometries and architectures, material-to-device integration, and large-area processing. The presentation will show the first demonstrations of laser additive manufacturing applied to thermoelectric materials and discuss the link between materials, manufacturing, and system-level considerations for thermoelectric power generators.

ESE Seminar: "Electrical Digestive Engineering"
2020-09-15 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email ESE for Link jbatter@seas.upenn.edu
Gastrointestinal (GI) problems are the second leading cause for missing work or school after the common cold, giving rise to 10 percent of the reasons a patient visits their physician and costing $142 billion annually. Although obstructions and infections are easy to diagnose, more than half of GI disorders involve abnormal functioning of the GI tract, where diagnosis entails subjective symptom-based questionnaires or objective but invasive, intermittent procedures in specialized centers. In this talk, we will describe electrical waves of pacemaker activity that underlie contractions for digestion, their interconnection with the nervous and immune systems, and how their propagation patterns can go awry in GI disorders. We will describe our development of high-resolution multi-electrode abdominal recording systems as well as dynamic spatial signal processing methods that in concert enable extraction of propagation patterns that are typically acquired invasively in specialized centers. Development of a miniaturized recording system to perform 24-hour ambulatory recordings, with an example of how this aided in solving a complex patient case, will also be discussed. We will conclude with a vision for how modernizing gastroenterology with applied mathematics and engineering has transformational potential to remove bottlenecks, improve health outcomes, and reduce healthcare costs by improving timely diagnoses, optimizing interventions, and predicting treatment responses.

CIS Seminar: "Recovering, manipulating and enhancing recorded speech (1905-2020)"
2020-09-15 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom – Email CIS for link, cherylh@cis.upenn.edu
This talk will survey several recent projects dealing with recorded speech. The first explores
an optical process for recovering sound recorded onto postcards using a forgotten technology
from more than a century ago. This involves scanning the postcard at multiple orientations using
a flatbed scanner, and then reconstructing the fine scale surface texture of the card (where the
audio is encoded) using photometric stereo, a technique from computer vision. We will then
discuss more modern applications as well, including a text-based interface for editing recorded
audio narration that is capable of synthesizing new words matching the voice of the narrator.
Finally, given that real-world audio recordings are often degraded by factors such as noise,
reverberation, and equalization distortion, we will also introduce a deep learning method to
transform recorded speech to sound as though it had been recorded in a studio.

BE/MINS Seminar: "Mapping emotions: discovering structure in mesoscale electrical brain recordings" (Kafui Dzirasa, Duke University)
2020-09-16 16:00 - 17:00
This seminar is co-hosted by the Department of Bioengineering and the Mahoney Institute for Neurosciences. Hosts Danielle Bassett and Josh Gold.
This event will be held virtually via Bluejeans: https://bluejeans.com/9789833127. Contact Jacqueline Fowlkes with questions at jfowlkes@pennmedicine.upenn.edu.

MSE Seminar: "III-V photovoltaic substrate reuse using fracture"
2020-09-17 10:45 - 11:45
Controlled spalling of single-crystal semiconductors is an emerging technique which results in the rapid exfoliation of a thin, single-crystal layer by propagating fracture parallel to the wafer surface. Spalling fracture has been engineered to controllably and intentionally exfoliate thin film electronic devices from single-crystal semiconductors for the purposes of creating flexible devices or enabling substrate reuse to mitigate costs. The process uses an adhered stressor layer combined with an externally applied mechanical force to initiate and propagate a lateral fracture parallel to the substrate surface. Proof-of-principle device demonstrations have been achieved at wafer scale and in multiple configurations, showing no loss of performance compared to conventionally processed devices while preserving the wafer for reuse, reclaim, or recycling for cost and material savings. In this talk, examples will be drawn mainly from spalling (100)-oriented Ge and GaAs to illustrate the impact of cleavage system alignment on the resulting fracture morphology and spalling conditions and will include single junction photovoltaic device data.

Climate Week: Africa and Climate Change: Challenges and Solutions in a Globalized World
2020-09-21 11:00 - 12:00
Speaker:
Anthony Nyong, Director of Climate Change and Green Growth at the African Development Bank (AfDB)
Speaker Bio:
Bio: Professor Anthony Nyong is the Director of Climate Change and Green Growth at the African Development Bank. He has about 30 years of experience in environmental and natural resources management, environmental and social safeguards, renewable energy and green growth that span academia, private sector and development finance. Positions he has held at the African Development Bank include Coordinator of the New Deal on Energy for Africa; Head of the Renewable Energy Flagship, Head of Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development; and Head of Compliance and Safeguards. Before joining the Bank, he was a Senior Climate Change Specialist at the International Development Research Centre of Canada and prior to that, a Professor of Climate Change at the University of Jos, Nigeria.
Prof. Nyong has served on several Global Advisory and Scientific Boards including the Sustainable Stock Exchange Green Finance Advisory Group, the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Agricultural Resilience in Nigeria; WHO Thematic Reference Group on Environment, Agriculture and Infectious Disease; Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility; the International Human Dimensions Program, Global Environmental Change and Food Systems, and Pan-African committee for the Global Change System for Analysis, Research and Training. He has served on the Boards of the Applied Center for Climate and Earth Systems Science, South Africa and the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh. Nyong is a member of the Planning Committee of the Climate and Health Initiative of the National Academy of Medicine (USA). He was a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and a member of the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis.
Mr. Nyong holds a Ph.D. in Geography from McMaster University, Canada and a D.Sc. (hc) from the University of Calabar in Nigeria, a post-graduate Diploma from the University of Oxford and a Masters Degree in Land Surveying from Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. He is a Senior Executive Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a Chartered Geographer, a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is named among the top 20 of the 100 most Influential People in Climate Policy 2019 by Apolitical.
Moderator:
Tukufu Zuberi, Professor of Sociology and The Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations at the University of Pennsylvania
Description:
Studies and forecasts indicate, according to Dr. Anthony Nyong, Director of Climate Change and Green Growth at the African Development Bank, that “While Africa bears a considerably large proportion of the impacts of climate change, it also has opportunities to enable it transition to a more sustainable growth pathway.” Dr. Nyong will discuss the effects of Climate Change in Africa and steps that encourage sustainability in Africa and thus resilience to Climate Change. These steps can lead to transformation and transition to green economies in the continent with positive global implications.

CIS Seminar: "Engineering Approximate Computations"
2020-09-22 03:00 - 04:00 | Zoom – Email CIS for link, cherylh@cis.upenn.edu
There’s a new ecosystem of applications that integrates machine learning into a variety of tasks. Typical domains have included image recognition and natural language processing. However, these techniques have also spread to computer systems domains, such as program compilation, resource scheduling, and database query optimization, yielding new computer systems that learn from data to achieve their goals.

With the success of these systems, we must grapple with the reality that they model and compute with objects that are inherently approximate — real numbers (only computable up to a given precision), neural networks (only validated on a given dataset), and probabilistic computations (results only computable up to a given probability). This reality presents many engineering questions about interpreting, debugging, validating, verifying, and optimizing these systems.

As an illustrative example of such a system, I’ll present Ithemal, our deep learning system for performance modeling of modern computer processors. Using data and simple models, our system predicts the performance of assembly code on modern Intel CPUs better than state-of-the-art, handcrafted techniques from LLVM and Intel.

Guided by Ithemal’s engineering challenges, I’ll present our work on reasoning about the semantics and performance of such a system.
In particular, I’ll present our results on the semantics of sound real-valued, differentiable, probabilistic computation, which is the core computational model behind this new class of systems. I’ll also present our work on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, a set of techniques for producing small trainable neural networks that are 10-20% of the size of standard architectures. The promise of this latter work is not only faster inference and training, but also smaller neural networks that are more amenable to reasoning, such as verifying their robustness

ESE Thesis Defense: "Constrained Learning and Inference"
2020-09-22 09:00 - 10:30 | Zoom – Email ESE for Link jbatter@seas.upenn.edu
Learning is a core component of the information processing and autonomous systems upon which we increasingly rely on to select job applicants, analyze medical data, and drive cars. As these systems become ubiquitous, so does the need to curtail their behavior. Left untethered, they are susceptible to tampering (adversarial examples) and prone to prejudiced and unsafe actions. Currently, this is done by either constructing models that embed the desired properties or tuning the training objective so as to promote them. Yet, these approaches are often tailored to specific problems, are hard to transfer between models, and involve time consuming trial-and-error procedures that are impractical even for the current scale and complexity of modern machine learning systems. In this defense, I develop the theoretical underpinnings of constrained learning to understand how requirements affect statistical learning and enable behaviors to be directly and systematically designed. To do so, I will derive a generalization theory for constrained learning based on the probably approximately correct (PAC) learning framework. In particular, I will show that imposing requirements does not make a learning problem harder in the sense that any PAC learnable class is also PAC constrained learnable using a constrained counterpart of the empirical risk minimization (ERM) rule. For typical parametrized models, however, this learner involves solving a non-convex constrained optimization program for which even obtaining a feasible solution may be hard. To overcome this issue, we prove that under mild conditions the empirical dual problem of constrained learning is also a PAC constrained learner. Hence, constrained learning problems can be solved by solving only unconstrained ones, leading to a practical constrained learning algorithm. We illustrate how constrained learning can address problems in fair and robust classification.

MEAM Seminar: "Robots and Mechatronic Systems can help us identify, assess, and treat Motor and Cognitive Impairment after Brain Injury"
2020-09-22 10:30 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) indicate that in 2017 about 12.7% of adults and children had some form of disability. Stroke is the leading cause of serious long-term disability with ~7 million in the US, which will increase by 20.5% by 2030. Cerebral Palsy is the leading cause of serious long-term disability in children with reports suggesting that 1 in 323 children in the US have CP which represent approximately ~230,000 children in the US. Both these diseases result in varying levels of motor and cognitive impairment due to brain injury which affects then affects the persons ability to complete activities of daily living and fully participate in society. Increasingly advanced technologies are being used to support identification, diagnosis, assessment, and therapy for patients with brain injury. Specifically, robot and mechatronic systems can provide patients, physicians and rehabilitation clinical providers with additional support to care for and improve the quality of life of children and adults with motor and cognitive impairment. This talk will provide a brief introduction to the area of rehabilitation robotics and ,via case studies, illustrate how we develop and use technology-assisted rehabilitation systems to assess motor and cognitive impairment, detect early evidence of functional impairment, and augment therapy in high and low-resource settings.

Climate Week: Advancing Technology to Ensure Food, Energy, and Water Security
2020-09-22 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker:
Cherie Kagan, Associate Dean of Research, Stephen J Angello Professor, Electrical and Systems Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, Penn Engineering. Director, NSF’s Internet of Thing’s for Precision Agriculture Engineering Research Center
Description:
Ensuring food, energy, and water security is a societal grand challenge. By 2050, the US population is estimated to grow from 330 million to 400 million, and the world population from 7.8 billion to 9.7 billion, requiring a 70% increase in global food production. Current agricultural practices account for 70% of global water use, and energy use accounts for the largest cost on a farm. Furthermore, the current inefficient use of agrochemicals is altering Earth’s ecosystems. With finite arable land, water, and energy resources, there is a critical need for new technologies and innovations to improve the efficiency of food production. These challenges provide a unique opportunity for scientists, engineers, practitioners, and other stakeholders to come together and develop new technologies and solutions that would not be realized without a convergent approach. The NSF Engineering Research Center for the Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture (IoT4Ag) unites faculty and students from the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, the University of California at Merced, and the University of Florida with government and industry partners, establishing a convergence of expertise in agronomy, agricultural engineering, socio-economics, environmental science, and the science and engineering of physical and cyber-physical systems needed to transform agriculture. The goal of this center is to ensure food, energy, and water security by advancing technology to increase crop production while minimizing the use of energy and water resources and the impact of agricultural practices on the environment. To realize this mission, IoT4Ag will create and translate to practice Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for precision agriculture and train an educated and diverse workforce that will address the societal grand challenge of food, energy, and water security for decades to come. IoT4Ag institutions are located in regions of the United States of intense agricultural production and represent the diversity of both crops and agricultural environments across the country. The coverage of these diverse geographical locations will ensure that a broad range of crop types will benefit from the research, education, and training of IoT4Ag, leading to the successful transformation of agricultural practices for a sustainable and secure future.
The IoT4Ag team will investigate how the complex systems of plant and environmental variables affect crop yield and resilience. To accomplish this task, center researchers will focus on the development of low-cost sensor technologies to measure these variables at relevant spatial and temporal scales. To utilize these sensors and the data collected, IoT4Ag will develop agriculture-specific communication technologies that relay data from sensors to both relevant farming equipment and to the cloud by autonomous aerial and ground-based robots equipped to be deployed at field scale. Data-driven models will capture plant physiology, soil properties and dynamics, historical weather trends and future forecasts, management practice variations, and socio-economic trends to provide farmers the situational awareness necessary for smart agricultural intervention and improved outcomes. Through the research and development of these proposed technologies and solutions, IoT4Ag will educate a diverse workforce of pre-college students, community college students, university students, and agriculture professionals through audience-specific lessons and hands-on classroom, laboratory, and field activities. These activities will arm this new workforce with the strong science and engineering knowledge to enable precision agriculture solutions. IoT4Ag will recruit, retain, and educate diverse participants and create a culture of inclusion through engagement, participation, and cohesion of a broad community of students, faculty, and professionals. This vibrant innovation ecosystem will bring together academic, government, and industry partners with the end-user farming community to ensure the rapid translation of IoT4Ag practices and technologies into commercial products and economic impact. Through all of these described activities, IoT4Ag will enable the transformation of agriculture, producing more crops for every drop of water or Joule of energy to realize a food, energy, and water-secure future for the United States.

MEAM PHD Thesis Defense: "Control of Dry Adhesion via Mechanics and Structuring"
2020-09-23 10:00 - 11:00 | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
Dry adhesives that rely on van der Waals forces have a number of applications due to their versatility, reusability, and repeatability. Applications include small-scale pick-and-place and microtransfer printing processes, wearable sensors, climbing/perching robots, and robotic gripping. However, van der Waals forces are macroscopically short-range and are the weakest of the interatomic forces, so careful mechanical design of adhesive structures is required to provide sufficient dry adhesion strength for many of these applications. This thesis investigates the mechanics-based design of structured dry adhesives with enhanced and controllable adhesion.
First, a mechanics-based strategy for achieving the optimum interfacial stress distribution of an elastic layer to realize high adhesion strength is presented. Second, dry adhesion tuning via the control of the interfacial stress distribution via subsurface pressure modulation in soft device is analyzed and demonstrated. Then, the mechanics of adhesion of flat-ended pillars with non-circular contacts to enable the design of fibrillar adhesives with high packing density is investigated. Finally, the mechanics of tunable adhesion in microtransfer printing processes is examined and a strategy to provide robust control of microtransfer printing processes is proposed.

Climate Week: Carbon Offsets Should Make a Difference: Connecting Offsets for University-Sponsored Air Travel to a Vision for an Energy and Climate Partnership with West Philadelphia
2020-09-23 11:00 - 12:00
Speakers:
Megan Ryerson, UPS Chair of Transportation, Associate Dean for Research, Weitzman School
Benjamin C. Pierce, Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Information Science, Penn Engineering
William W. Braham, Professor of Architecture, Director of the Master of Environmental Building Design and of the Center for Environmental Building + Design, Weitzman School
Steve Luxton, Executive Director/CEO at the Energy Coordinating Agency of Philadelphia (ECA). ECA provides community-based energy efficiency services and assistance to low-income families in Philadelphia.
Andrew Huemmler, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Member of the Board of Directors of the Energy Coordinating Agency of Philadelphia
Regina Bynum, Director of Teaching and Learning for University-Assisted Community School Programs, The Netter Center for Community Partnerships
Moderator:
Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature, Chair of the Climate Week at Penn Organizing Team
Description:
Before the pandemic, air travel was one of the major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. Whether you travel privately or for your institution or company, invariably air travel makes up the biggest chunk of your carbon footprint and overshadows your other efforts. To its credit, the University of Pennsylvania recognized that University-sponsored air travel made up 20% of Penn’s carbon emissions, making it the second largest source of carbon emissions at Penn. In January, 2020, the University announced a plan to purchase carbon offsets to neutralize its emissions. Join Penn experts and Steve Luxton, CEO of the Energy Coordinating Agency, for a webinar that will focus on
– the carbon footprint of air travel and air transportation trends in the US and globally
– how carbon offsets work and what options there are for individuals
– Penn’s plans to offset university-sponsored air travel
– developing a vision of how Penn could invest its carbon offsets to help residents in West Philadelphia become more energy efficient, switch to renewables, and become more climate adaptive

MSE Seminar: "How to Care for Yourself While Navigating a Complex World"
2020-09-24 10:45 - 11:45
As graduate students, it can be difficult to maintain a sense of balance throughout your academic career. There are often multiple demands on your time, from having a social life while performing well academically to maintaining your mental health and wellness. However, 2020 has brought unique challenges that include, managing a global pandemic, navigating issues related to racism and xenophobia and coping with significant losses of loved ones and experiences. Come join us as we discuss the impact of these stressors on your mental health and explore strategies for coping.

Climate Week: Embodied Carbon and the Built Environment: A Focus on Mass Timber
2020-09-24 11:00 - 12:00
Speakers:
Kerry Phillips, Associate at Lake|Flato Architects
Heather Gayle Holdridge, Director of Design Performance at Lake|Flato Architects
Terry Pattillo, AIA, Mid-Atlantic Regional Director, WoodWorks – Wood Products Council
Moderator:
Stephanie Carlisle, Senior Researcher, Carbon Leadership Forum

BE Seminar: "Patients, Providers and Data: How the EMR and Data Science are Changing Clinical Care" (Kevin Johnson)
2020-09-24 15:00 - 16:00
This event will be held virtually via zoom. Check your email for the link and passcode or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu.
The electronic health record (EHR) is a powerful application of Systems Engineering to healthcare. It is a byproduct of a host of pressures including cost, consolidation of providers into networks, uniform drivers of quality, and the need for timely care across disparate socioeconomic and geographic landscapes within health systems. The EHR is also a fulcrum for innovation and one of the most tangible examples of how data science affects our health and health care. In this talk I will showcase projects from my lab that demonstrate the multi-disciplinary nature of biomedical informatics/data science research and translation using the EHR, and our current understanding of its potential from my perspective as a pediatrician, a researcher in biomedical informatics, a Chief Information Officer, an educator, and an advisor to local and international policy. I will describe advances in applying human factors engineering to support medical documentation and generic prescribing, approaches to improve medication safety, and innovations to support precision medicine and interoperability. I will present our efforts to integrate EHR-enabled data science into the Vanderbilt health system and provide a vision for what this could mean for our future.

SIG Seminar: "Coupling Sub-Grid Solids, Simulating Liquid Metals, and Inferring Facial Expressions"
2020-09-25 10:00 - 11:00 | Zoom – Email CIS for link, cherylh@cis.upenn.edu
This lecture will discuss recent results in computational physics, computer graphics, and learning/data science. The first section will present a method for accurately simulating two-way solid-fluid coupling even when solids may be smaller than the size of a computational grid cell. Next, a numerical method for simulating materials with large surface energy (such as liquid metals) will be discussed. The third part of the lecture will introduce techniques for obtaining sparse semantic solutions to inverse and optimization problems, with a case study of inferring facial expressions from RGB images. The lecture will conclude with future research directions at the interfaces of simulation, graphics, learning, and data.

Climate Week: A Case for Carbon Removal From Air
2020-09-25 11:00 - 12:00
Speakers:
Jennifer Wilcox, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy, Penn Engineering, Weitzman School
Noah McQueen, Third year Ph.D. candidate in Chemical Engineering, Penn Engineering
Moderator:
Mark Alan Hughes, Founding Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy
Description:
As the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) continues to rise, it is imperative that we develop technologies that not only mitigate CO2 emissions, but also remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere. There are a variety of approaches that are being developed to do just this, and many approaches will be required to achieve a meaningful scale to mitigate climate change. In our work, we have been developing a novel, land-based magnesium oxide looping process to capture CO2 from the air. The process takes in magnesium carbonate (MgCO3) and calcines the material at high temperatures (roughly 600 – 900ºC) to produce amorphous MgO. The produced MgO is subsequently spread out over land to carbonate for a year. Following carbonation, the mineral is recollected and recalcined to reproduce MgO and a high purity stream of CO2. The MgO can then be spread out over the land to carbonate again. The resulting CO2 may be compressed and stored geologically or otherwise utilized. This carbon removal approach demonstrates the potential for high impact, low cost carbon removal.
Preliminary experiments were performed to corroborate the experimental uptake rate of CO2 onto MgO. Additional laboratory experiments will focus on the effect of the ambient reaction conditions on the overall kinetic rate. Further, we have planned experiments for a small pilot test at the Pennovation center. This will use 1 m by 1 m containers of MgO to determine the viability of the process in open, realistic ambient conditions, as well as the impact of different experimental parameters on the reaction rate (including bed depth, particle size distribution and material vendor). These parameters will help us optimize the MgO looping process and determine the potential impact as a carbon removal approach.

PICS Workshop: "Machine Learning with MATLAB"
2020-09-26 10:00 - 16:00 | Zoom – Email CIS for link, cherylh@cis.upenn.edu
Machine learning is a data analytics technique that teaches computers to do what comes naturally to humans and animals: learn from experience. Machine learning algorithms use computational methods to “learn” information directly from data without relying on a predetermined equation as a model.
Using MATLAB, engineers and other domain experts have deployed thousands of applications for predictive maintenance, sensor analytics, finance, and communication electronics.
In this hands-on workshop, you will use MATLAB to:

Learn the fundamentals of machine learning and understand terms like “supervised learning”, “feature extraction”, and “hyperparameter tuning”
Build and evaluate machine learning models for classification and regression
Perform automatic hyperparameter tuning and feature selection to optimize model performance
Apply signal processing and feature extraction techniques

Please register here if you would like to attend: https://www.mathworks.com/company/events/seminars/machine-learning-with-matlab-a-hands-on-workshop-3212994.html

MEAM Seminar: "Aluminum Scandium Nitride Microdevices for Next Generation Nonvolatile Memory and Microelectromechanical Systems"
2020-09-29 10:30 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
Aluminum Nitride (AlN) is a well-established thin film piezoelectric material. AlN bulk acoustic wave (BAW) radio frequency (RF) filters were one of the key innovations that enabled the 3G and 4G smart phone revolution. Recently, the substitutional doping of scandium (Sc) for aluminum (Al) to form aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) has been studied to significantly enhance the piezoelectric properties and to introduce ferroelectric properties into AlN based material systems. The properties achieved have profound implications for the performance of future 5G and 6G RF filters, piezoelectric sensors, piezoelectric energy harvesters, and for scaling the bit density of ferroelectric nonvolatile memories. This talk will present on the synthesis of highly Sc doped AlScN materials of the thickness and quality needed for applications in memory and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The material properties achieved will be reported and placed in the context of device specific figures-of-merit and competing material systems. Ferroelectric and electromechanical devices that utilize the unique properties of AlScN to achieve state-of-the-art (SOA) performance will be shown.

ESE Seminar: "Evolutionary Adaptations and Spreading Processes in Complex Networks"
2020-09-29 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email ESE for Link jbatter@seas.upenn.edu
A common theme among many models for spreading processes in networks is the assumption that the propagating object (e.g., a pathogen, in the context of infectious disease propagation, or a piece of information, in the context of information propagation) is transferred across network nodes without going through any modification. However, in real-life spreading processes, pathogens often evolve in response to changing environments or medical interventions, and information is often modified by individuals before being forwarded. In this talk, we will discuss the effects of such adaptations on spreading processes in complex networks with the aim of revealing their role in determining the threshold, probability, and final size of epidemics, and exploring the interplay between them and the structural properties of the network.

CIS Seminar: "Experiencing a new Internet architecture"
2020-09-29 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom – Email CIS for link, cherylh@cis.upenn.edu
Imagining a new Internet architecture enables us to explore new networking concepts without the constraints imposed by the current infrastructure. What are the benefits of a routing protocol that does not rely on convergence? What about a data plane without inter-domain forwarding tables on routers? How can we build secure systems if a router can derive a symmetric key for any host within 20ns?
In this presentation, we invite you to join us on our 11-year long expedition of creating a next-generation secure Internet architecture: SCION. SCION has already been deployed at several ISPs and domains, and has been in production use for the past 3 years. On our journey, we have found that path-aware networking and multipath communication not only provide security benefits, but also enable higher efficiency for communication, increased network capacity, and even reduce power utilization.

ESE PhD Defense: "Orbital angular momentum microlasers: From the first demonstration to ultrafast tunability"
2020-09-29 15:00 - 17:00 | Zoom – Email ESE for Link jbatter@seas.upenn.edu
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) carried by structured vortex light establishes a new information dimension, thereby promising high capacity optical communication and high performance computation in both classical and quantum regimes. Meanwhile, laser is the key driver in the field of optics and photonics over other photonic components. Since its discovery, laser technology has demonstrated strong impacts on a broad variety of applications, especially in today’s information technology supporting fast growing cloud computing and communication. As microlaser plays an imperative role in modern integrated photonic platforms, the development of OAM microlasers capable of direct generation of vortex light is critical in applying unbounded OAMs as information carriers to address the upcoming information explosion. However, conventional microlaser designs offer coherent emission with rather simple polarization/phase states and suffer from instability. In this work, we bring the non-Hermitian physics into the regime of nanophotonics to explore feasible designs of OAM microlasers. Non-Hermitian photonics based on parity-time symmetry successfully expands the design freedom from real material permittivity to a complete complex domain, providing a versatile toolbox that empowers new functionalities in the realm of nanophotonics. Adapting optical non-Hermiticity into the design of microlasers enables enhanced lasing stability and efficiency, leading to vortex microlaser emissions with a high sideband suppression ratio. By tailoring the complex index modulations at an exceptional point (EP) on a microring laser, we demonstrated the very first OAM microlaser of which both the topological charge and the polarization state can be designed on demand. More recently, we successfully promoted the OAM microlaser technology and achieved a dynamically tunable and scalable vortex microlaser, providing 5 different OAM states at the same wavelength, by optically controlled non-Hermitian coupling and spin-orbit interaction. Moreover, we realized the ultrafast control of the fractional OAM by leveraging the rapid transient response of the semiconductor optical gain and demonstrated continuous sweeping of the fractional charge of microlaser emissions from 0 to +2 in a 100 ps time scale. The toolbox of ultrafast generation and control of various vortex light holds great promise for the development of entirely new high-speed secure information systems in a unique multidimensional space.

CBE Seminar: "Understanding and Engineering Catalytic Materials Using Nanocrystal Precursors"
2020-09-30 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom – Email CBE for link
Abstract

Catalytic processes are central to the goal of a sustainable future. A promising approach in developing catalytic materials is represented by the design of catalytic sites based on the knowledge of reaction mechanisms and structure-property relationships and aided by computation, and in the precise synthesis of these sites at the atomic and molecular level. Nanocrystal precursors, with tunable active sites and compositions, can help in this mission. The goal of this talk is to show how this approach can provide not only fundamental understanding of catalytic reactions, but also a way to precisely engineer sites to produce efficient catalysts that are active, stable and selective for several important transformations. Advances in the synthesis of these materials will be presented. Examples of the use of these building blocks as supported systems, or in combination with hybrid organic materials, will be shown. This will be done to both understand trends in methane and CO2 activation, and in the preparation of optimized catalytic systems combining multiple active phases. In all these examples, important efforts to obtain precious structure-property relationships will be highlighted with this knowledge used to prepare more efficient and stable catalysts for the sustainable production of fuels and chemicals.

MSE Seminar: "Predicting Properties of Structurally and Chemically Complex Materials using Physics-informed Statistical Learning"
2020-10-01 10:45 - 11:45
To apply statistics and data science tools to aid computational designs of materials is under fast development. There are two unique aspects of the applications of these tools in materials science. First, the training sets are usually small. Second, physical mechanisms of material properties can be applied to facilitate the constructions of descriptors and statistics learning methods. In this talk, I will give three examples to address these two issues. The first example is to use machine learning to predict density and elastic moduli of SiO2-based glasses. Our machine learning approach relies on a training set generated by high-throughput atomistic simulations and a set of elaborately constructed descriptors with the fundamental physics of interatomic bonding. The predictions of our model are comprehensively compared and validated with a large amount of both simulation and experimental data. In the second example, a general linear correlation can be found between two descriptors of local electronic structures at defects in pure metals and the solute-defect interaction energies in binary alloys of refractory metals with transition-metal substitutional solutes. This linear correlation plus a residual-corrected regression model provides quantitative and efficient predictions on the solute-defect interactions in alloys. In addition, with these local/global electronic descriptors and a simple bond-counting model, we developed regression models to accurately and efficiently predict the unstable stacking fault energy (γusf) and surface energy (γsurf) for refractory multicomponent alloys. Using the regression models, we performed a systematic screening of γusf, γsurf, and their ratio in the high-order multicomponent systems to search for alloy candidates that may have enhanced strength-ductile synergies. First-principles calculations also confirmed search results.
