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    • ASSET Seminar: “Formal Methods for Language Model Systems”

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

    Formal methods are often dismissed as too rigid, complex, or unscalable for frontier language model systems (e.g., LLMs, VLMs, agentic systems). In this talk, I will challenge this assumption with both theoretical insights and empirical evidence across various domains, including chatbots, autonomous driving, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic AI. I will present a new set of efficient formal frameworks for […]

    MSE Seminar: “Polymer Chain-End Chemistry: Unlocking Next-Generation Functional Materials”

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

    End-group functionalization has become a powerful and versatile strategy in polymer science, enabling precise control over physical properties, nanoscale self-assembly, and interfacial functionality without modifying the polymer backbone. In our group’s research, we have investigated (1) how tailored end groups affect intrinsic polymer characteristics such as thermal transitions, solubility, and crystallization behavior, and (2) how […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Nonlinear Modeling, Synthesis, and Design-for-Additive Manufacturing of Smart Compliant Mechanisms”

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

    Compliant mechanisms have been the subject of intense research in recent decades. Making compliant mechanisms “smart” to form flexible, adaptive structures is the focus of my research group, with applications ranging from medical devices to aerospace structures. This seminar will describe recent work on modeling and synthesis approaches for compliant mechanisms with both superelastic material […]

    ESE 2026 Jack Keil Wolf Lecture – “Convex Optimization”

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    Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Convex optimization has emerged as useful tool for applications that include data analysis and model fitting, machine learning and statistics, resource allocation, engineering design, network design and optimization, finance, and control and signal processing. We give an overview of the basic mathematics, algorithms, and software frameworks for convex optimization, and give a few examples. We […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Constitutive Modeling of Rubbery Networks: From Microscale Physics to Macroscopic Behavior”

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

    Rubbery polymer networks, including elastomers and hydrogels, are increasingly employed in advanced applications such as biomedical implants, drug delivery systems, and smart sensors and actuators. Their macroscopic mechanical properties, such as stiffness, strength, and stretchability, are largely governed by network-level features, including polymer chain length distribution, crosslink density, and network heterogeneities and topological defects. Consequently, […]

    Spring 2026 GRASP on Robotics: Ming C. Lin, University of Maryland, College Park, “Learning the Dynamic World “

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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 With increasing availability of data in various forms from images, audio, video, 3D models, motion capture, simulation results, to satellite imagery, representative samples of the various phenomena constituting the world around us bring new opportunities and research challenges. Such availability of data has […]

    • Joseph Bordogna Forum: 2026 Lecture

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

    Engineering Leadership in a World of Accelerating Change Engineering bridges science and technology, driving innovation for the benefit of people and society. Today we live in an increasingly technology-dependent world shaped by engineers — and the pace of change is increasing exponentially. This calls for a reexamination of how we educate and empower engineers to […]

    Spring 2026 GRASP on Robotics: Roni Sengupta, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “From Pixels to Physics: Understanding and Manipulating Physics from Images”

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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 A hallmark of human vision is the ability to reason about the physics of the world: we can infer the shape of the object, how light reflects off the object, and how the object deforms under force. Yet today’s AI systems still lack […]

    PICS Colloquium: “Stochastic Reaction-Diffusion-Dynamics Modeling of whole systems: application to fibrin clot contraction and fibrin clot rupture” with Valeri Barsegov

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

    Abstract: Stochastic Reaction-Diffusion-Dynamics Model (SRDDM) for particle-based simulations of mechanochemical processes for thermodynamically large systems with high spatial and temporal resolution will be presented. The SRDDM couples the spatially inhomogeneous reaction-diffusion master equation to account for chemical reactions and molecular transport within the Langevin Dynamics (LD) framework to describe force-dependent dynamic processes at the whole […]

    PICS Colloquium: “Learning parsimonious models by covariance balancing” with Clarence Rowley

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    Abstract: Data-driven reduced-order models often struggle with high-dimensional nonlinear systems sensitive to low-variance coordinates, which are typically truncated. To address this, we use ideas from balanced truncation and active subspaces to identify low-dimensional coordinate systems that balance adjoint-based sensitivity information with state variance along trajectories. Our method, analogous to balanced truncation, replaces system Gramians with […]