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    • ASSET Seminar: “Testing AI’s Implicit World Models”

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

    Many of the robustness properties that are required for real-world applications of AI would be realized by a model that has understood the world. But it is unclear how to measure understanding, let alone how to define it. This talk will propose theoretically-grounded definitions and metrics that test for a model's implicit understanding, or its […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Wei Wang, University of Wisconsin–Madison, “Toward Advanced Autonomy in Complex Aquatic Environments”

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

    This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.  ABSTRACT Marine robots have undergone significant growth, driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence, sensing technologies, and decision-making systems. As demands for ocean exploration, exploitation, and conservation continue to rise, there is an increasing necessity for advanced autonomy in […]

    MSE PhD Thesis Defense: “Rheology and Clogging Study of Filamentous Suspensions: Bridging Microscopic Dynamics and Macroscopic Behaviors” 

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    Towne 337

    Suspensions of filamentous materials, or filamentous suspensions, represent a unique class of complex fluids in which the interplay between particle anisotropy and filament interactions – both intra- and inter-filament associations –gives rise to rich and tunable rheological behaviors. Such suspensions are ubiquitous across natural and engineered systems, with their applications ranging from the locomotion of microorganisms and […]

    MSE Seminar: “Building Cyberinfrastructure for Advancing Laboratories of the Future”

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

    The development of automated experimental facilities and the growing trend of experimental data digitization brought enormous opportunities for radically advancing laboratories. As many laboratory research tasks involve predicting and understanding previously unknown physical or chemical relationships, the availability of experimental data enables machine learning (ML) approaches to substantially accelerate the conventional design-build-test-learn process. In this […]

    FOLDS seminar: Function Space Perspectives on Neural Networks

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

    Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722   This talk reviews a theory of the functions learned by neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activations. At its core is the observation that deep ReLU networks can be characterized as solutions to data-fitting problems in certain infinite dimensional function spaces. The solutions are compositions of functions from Banach spaces of […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Exploring Self-Assembly of 2D Materials: Insights from Graphene Auto-Kirigami”

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

    In nature, thin sheets bend, fold, and curve to create functional three-dimensional forms—from insect wings to leaves and flower petals. Over the past decades, such behavior has inspired engineered systems ranging from soft robotics to deployable electronics. Extending these ideas to atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene opens new opportunities: these materials can […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Jie Tan, Google DeepMind, “Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical 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 Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. In this talk, I will present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) […]

    ESE Guest Seminar – “The Nonlinear Small-Gain Theory for Networks and Control”

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

    The world is nonlinear and linked. In this talk, I will present the origin of the small-gain theory and show that it serves as an important systematic tool for addressing two fundamental problems for networks: When is a dynamical network robustly stable? When can a dynamical network be made robustly stable by feedback? As an […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “On Riccati Equations in Nonconvex Optimization”

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 515 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, United States

    Riccati equations are ubiquitous in systems/control theory and are frequently solved by the methods of continuous optimization. In some cases, it is known that solutions can be obtained quickly and efficiently by convex-optimization methods, but small modifications to these settings can easily destroy convexity, limiting the applicability of convex-optimization methods. This thesis considers manifold and […]

    PICS Colloquium: Macroscopic stochastic thermodynamics with Massimiliano Esposito [VIRTUAL]

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

    This speaker event is virtual, but will be screened in PICS 534 with refreshments. Equilibrium thermodynamics emerges from equilibrium statistical mechanics as the most likely behavior of a system in the macroscopic limit. Over the last two decades, significant progress has been made in formulating statistical mechanics for small systems operating far-from-equilibrium. The resulting theory […]

    ESE Guest Seminar – “Van der Waals Quantum Materials for Magnetism and Clean Energy”

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    Room 35, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    In recent years, numerous magnetic van der Waals layered quantum materials have been reported, including transition-metal halides, transition-metal chalcogenides, transition-metal phosphorus chalcogenides, and metal oxy- and chalco-halides. Unlike 3D counterparts, layered magnets can be easily and rapidly exfoliated to yield ultra-thin magnets, providing unique opportunities for both fundamental physics and new technologies. Furthermore, these materials […]

    ESE Ph.D. Seminar: “Nonconvex Linear System Identification”

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

    The goal of system identification (SysID) is to learn a mathematical model from a corpus of temporal observations of a system's inputs and outputs. SysID is a fundamental problem in engineering, with applications ranging from circuit design to robot control. Classical approaches to linear SysID rely on convex relaxations that offer strong theoretical guarantees. However, […]