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    • ESE seminar: “Engineering the Quantum Vacuum”

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

    The vacuum of space may seem empty and boring; however, this void is actually teeming with activity. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, fluctuations of electromagnetic fields are omnipresent even in empty space. These fluctuations can manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including the generation of nanoscale forces between objects—a phenomenon known as […]

    CIS Seminar:” Physical Scene Understanding”

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

    Abstract: Human intelligence is beyond pattern recognition. From a single image, we're able to explain what we see, reconstruct them in 3D, predict what's going to happen, and plan our actions. In this talk, I will present our recent work on physical scene understanding---reverse-engineering these capacities to make machines that are versatile, data-efficient, and have […]

    ESE Seminar: “Hybrid Quantum Networks: Interfacing Photons, Phonons, and Superconducting Qubits”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Quantum information science strives to utilize the fundamental laws of physics to achieve revolutionary improvement in computation, communication, and sensing. Existing quantum protocols rely on a wide variety of physical platforms for storing, transferring, and processing of quantum information. Optical photons are the ideal carriers of information because of their low loss, large bandwidth of […]

    ESE Seminar: “Physics-Driven Sensing and Processing: From Computational Periscopy to Particle Beam Microscopy”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    In many areas of science and engineering, novel signal acquisition methods allow unprecedented access to physical measurements. From digital cameras to microscopes and nano-scale biosensors, the data generated are shaped by both the underlying physics of the phenomena and characteristics of the acquisition device. Meanwhile, in many practical scenarios, the useful signals are remarkably weak, […]

    CIS Seminar: “Cataloging the Visible Universe through Bayesian Inference at Petascale”

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

    Abstract: A key task in astronomy is to locate astronomical objects in images and to characterize them according to physical parameters such as brightness, color, and morphology. This task, known as cataloging, is challenging for several reasons: many astronomical objects are much dimmer than the sky background, labeled data is generally unavailable, overlapping astronomical objects […]

    CIS Seminar: “Towards Generalization and Efficiency in Reinforcement Learning”

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

    Abstract: In classic supervised machine learning, a learning agent behaves as a passive observer: it receives examples from some external environment which it has no control over and then makes predictions. Reinforcement Learning (RL), on the other hand, is fundamentally interactive : an autonomous agent must learn how to behave in an unknown and possibly […]

    PRiML Seminar: “Optimizing probability distributions for learning: sampling meets optimization”

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    Room 401B, 3401 Walnut 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Optimization and sampling are both of central importance in large-scale machine learning problems, but they are typically viewed as very different problems. This talk presents recent results that exploit the interplay between them. Viewing Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms as performing an optimization over the space of probability distributions, we demonstrate analogs of Nesterov's acceleration approach in the sampling domain, […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Interfacial Soft Matter”

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

    Surface tension plays a critical role in a wide range of biological, environmental, technological and geophysical settings. In this talk, I will present three different problems dealing with interfacial soft matter that find motivation in markedly diverse areas. First, I will discuss the evaporation kinetics and flow dynamics of non-spherical sessile drops undergoing phase change. […]

    ESE Seminar: “New Designer Materials: Sculpting Electromagnetic Fields on the Atomic Scale”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    New optical nanomaterials hold the potential for breakthroughs in a wide range of areas from ultrafast optoelectronics such as modulators, light sources and hyperspectral detectors, to efficient upconversion for energy applications, bio-sensing and quantum information science. An exciting opportunity to realize such new nanomaterials lies in controlling the local electromagnetic environment on the atomic- and […]