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    • 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 […]

    BE Seminar – “Engineered bacteria for cancer therapy” (Tal Danino, Columbia University)

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

    Synthetic biology is driving a new era of medicine through the genetic programming of living cells. One particular focus has been the engineering of bacteria as therapeutic delivery systems for cancer, where microbes colonize and release payloads within tumors. Here, genetic circuits are designed to enhance spatial and temporal control of microbial behaviors for improved […]

    CIS Seminar: “Bridging Informal and Formal AI Reasoning”

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

    Neural language models have opened a fascinating, flexible platform for reasoning in mathematics, programming, and beyond. This talk will explore the intersection of these models and the rigor of formal reasoning. First, I discuss my work on building foundation models for mathematics and using language to guide the search for formally verified proofs. Then, I […]

    PICS Colloquium: Powering decarbonization with modeling and optimization of renewables in the multi-scale atmosphere

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

    To meet net-zero carbon emissions targets by mid-century, up to a -fold increase in wind power capacity is required. Acceleration to this rate requires urgent improvements to efficiency and reliability of installed wind farms, as well as cost reductions for future offshore farms. To expand energy production, wind turbines are rapidly increasing in size, wind […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Miniaturized Robots and Probes for Precision Health”

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

    Designing miniaturized robots and bioelectronic devices will enable access throughout the entire human body, leading to novel procedures at the cellular level and offering localized diagnosis and treatment with unprecedented precision and efficiency. However, the soft, complex, and multi-dimensional nature of biological systems poses significant challenges for mechanical design, manufacturing, materials engineering, and functional integration […]

    ESE Spring Seminar – “AI as a Lens: Expanding Vision for Scientific Discovery”

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

    Conventional approaches to scientific discovery often prioritize building larger sensors, gathering more data, and scaling up computational power. In this talk, I will present a complementary perspective: extracting insights hidden in the data we already have. The key lies in using AI not as a black-box predictor, but as a tool for interpreting data through […]

    CIS Seminar: “Efficient Probabilistically Checkable Proofs from High-Dimensional Expanders”

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

    The PCP theorem, proved in the 90’s, shows how to encode a proof for any theorem into a format where the theorem's correctness can be verified by making only a constant number of queries to the proof. This result is a significant milestone in computer science and has important implications for approximation algorithms, cryptography, and […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Real-Time Safe and Energy-Efficient UAV Motion Planning in Windy Urban Environments”

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

    Recent advancements in hardware and software are bringing autonomous aerial vehicles closer than ever to finally delivering on futuristic visions of flying cars and package delivery drones. However, the safe deployment of autonomous aircraft at scale in urban environments poses significant challenges, one of which being uncertainties contributed by complex spatial and temporal winds. Clusters […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Demystifying the Inner Workings of Language Models”

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

    Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) power a rapidly-growing and increasingly impactful suite of AI technologies. However, due to their scale and complexity, we lack a fundamental scientific understanding of much of LLMs’ behavior, even when they are open source. The “black-box” nature of LMs not only complicates model debugging and evaluation, but also limits trust […]

    Spring 2025 GRASP SFI: Qinghua Liu, Microsoft Research, “When Is Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning Not Scary?”

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    Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Partial observability is ubiquitous in Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications, where agents must make sequential decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system. Partially observable RL is notoriously challenging in theory—well-known information-theoretic results […]

    CBE & BE Seminar: “Targeting the Brain and Behavior to Probe the Dynamics of Aging” (Claire Bedbrook, Stanford University)

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    Bio & Abstract: Claire Bedbrook is an engineer and neuroscientist working to extend lifespan by modulating the brain. Claire was trained in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology with Professor Frances Arnold and Professor Viviana Gradinaru, where she engineered molecular tools […]