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    • ESE 5160 Special Lecture: “Taking RoboRacer Off-Road: Learning Extreme Off-Road Mobility”

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    Towne 327

    In this guest lecture, we will cover two recent research thrusts from the RobotiXX lab in taking RoboRacer off-road: high-speed off-road navigation and wheeled mobility on vertically challenging terrain. For high-speed off-road navigation, we will introduce a sequential line of work with every work inspired by and built upon its prior work, ranging from inverse […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Inverse design for engineering complex light-matter interaction”

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    Moore 317 200 S 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    The inverse design paradigm has emerged as a transformative approach for the synthesis of nanophotonic structures, offering a powerful alternative to conventional intuition-driven design. By approaching photonic device design as a computational optimization problem, inverse design enables the systematic exploration of high-dimensional parameter spaces to uncover non- intuitive structures that meet complex performance targets. This […]

    CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Structure and transport properties of nanoporous polymers derived from lyotropic mesophases” (Christopher Johnson)

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

    Abstract: Burgeoning energy and water scarcity challenges motivate the development of new membrane materials for charge transport as well as chemical and water separations. This in turn requires an improved understanding of the physics that govern charged and uncharged solute transport in membranes, and particularly the motion of such species in nm-scale confinement in polymeric […]

    MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Investigating Jet Interactions in the Multi-Jet SALP Robot”

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    David Rittenhouse Laboratory Building, Room 4E19 209 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Jet propulsion is a common locomotion strategy in nature. We developed an underwater particle image velocimetry (PIV) system to investigate the hydrodynamic effects of the SALP (Salp-inspired Approach to Low-energy Propulsion) robot, a soft underwater robot that swims using jet propulsion. Multiple SALP units can be physically connected to form a multi-SALP system, coordinating their […]

    MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “In Situ Additive Manufacturing of Metal-Graphene Composites by Upcycling Polymers”

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    4E9, DRLB 209 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a bourgeoning additive manufacturing technique for rapid prototyping and creating unconventional designs using metal alloys. In parallel, graphene has garnered significant research interest since its discovery, owing to its remarkable mechanical and transport properties. Driven by the potential advances in additive manufacturing, this project aims to harness the intrinsically […]

    Spring 2025 GRASP Seminar: Robin Walters, Northeastern University, “Pushing the Limits of Equivariant Neural Networks”

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 306 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in AGH 306 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Despite the success of deep learning, there remain challenges to progress. Deep models require vast datasets to train, can fail to generalize under surprisingly small changes in domain, and lack guarantees on performance. Incorporating symmetry constraints into […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Biomedical Innovations for Global Health Research and Technology (BIGHEART): NOAS, EXODUS, iTEARS, and BOAS”

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    This presentation will discuss the concept of BIGHEART and present various illustrative examples of this approach. The initial focus will be on NOAS (Nanoscale Optical Antennas) within the context of quantitative life sciences and transformative medicine. NOAS facilitates the visualization of quantum biological electron transfer processes occurring in mitochondria within living cells, supports the precise […]

    CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Designing Solvent-Based Order Parameters for Characterizing Binding of Surfaces with Different Hydrophobicity Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations” (Jun Lu)

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    Greenberg Lounge (Room 114), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Abstract: Life is dependent on water: most self-assembly and binding processes of biomolecules take place in water. Water-mediated interactions are an essential driving force behind these processes, which is largely affected by the hydrophobicity of the binding surfaces. As many biomolecular binding interfaces are amphiphilic, the hydrophobic interactions are largely affected by polar and charged […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Graph Neural Networks for Communication in Multi-Agent Systems”

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    Room 313, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Communication networks support a wide range of applications in multi-agent systems by solving core problems such as routing, scheduling, and resource allocation. In this thesis, we focus on data-driven routing and scheduling strategies using local information subject to constraints using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). First, we study information routing in communication networks with constant channel […]

    ESE Guest Seminar – “Efficient Computing for AI and Robotics: From Hardware Accelerators to Algorithm Design”

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

    The compute demands of AI and robotics continue to rise due to the rapidly growing volume of data to be processed; the increasingly complex algorithms for higher quality of results; and the demands for energy efficiency and real-time performance. In this talk, we will discuss the design of efficient tailored hardware accelerators and the co-design […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Fake News, Echo Chambers, and Algorithms: A Data Science Perspective”

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

    Abstract: American democracy has been undermined by an “infodemic” of fake news, coupled with the widespread segregation of consumers into ideologically homogenous echo chambers by inscrutable algorithms deployed by rapacious social media platforms—or so we are told. In this talk, I will critically examine claims of this sort—made frequently by politicians, journalists, and public intellectuals—summarizing […]

    Spring 2025 GRASP SFI: Haimin Hu, Princeton University, “From Gambits to Assurances: Game-Theoretic Integration of Safety and Learning for Human-Centered Robotics”

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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 From autonomous vehicles navigating busy intersections to quadrupeds deployed in household environments, robots must operate safely and efficiently around people in uncertain and unstructured situations. However, today’s robots still struggle to robustly handle low- probability events without […]