Entrepreneurship Expo 2025
2025-08-27 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Stat
On Wednesday, August 27, from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM ET, Venture Lab is hosting the 2025 Entrepreneurship Expo, a one-stop experience for students to explore co-curricular programs, discover entrepreneurship clubs, and learn how to take the next step in their entrepreneurial journey.
From students who are curious about innovation to those actively launching ventures, the Expo offers pathways for skill-building, mentorship, funding, and more. It’s also a great way for students to network and get inspired by the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem at Penn.

Who’s invited: This event is ONLY open to active Penn students and special guests.
Location: 115 South 40th Street
When: Wednesday, August 27, from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM ET

Register Now

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Silica Nanoparticle-Based Platform for Rare Earth Element Recovery and Separation" (Ivy Dai)
2025-08-29 11:00 - 13:30 | Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Room 121, 231 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential for clean energy technologies including batteries for electrical vehicles, wind turbines and LED screens due to their unique magnetic, optical, and electronic properties. Efficient methods for their recovery and separation are urgently needed to meet the growing demands of a rapidly evolving green economy worldwide. However, current separation technologies, such as liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), suffer from harmful environmental impacts, scalability limitations and high energy costs, due to the similar physiochemical properties of REEs and the dependence on organic solvents. These environmental, operational, and economic challenges motivate the development of sustainable, selective and scalable REE separations.
Nanostructured materials, such as those incorporating silica nanoparticles (SiO 2 NPs), are promising materials to incorporate into REE separations due to their high surface area, tunable surface chemistry and environmental compatibility. Their scale offers several advantages, including high surface-to-volume ratio, integration into dynamic architectures, and stabilization of complex structures. These features offer new opportunities for designing alternative methods for REE recovery and separation methods which do not have the drawbacks of existing approaches.
This thesis focuses on developing a SiO 2 NP-based platform for REE separation, building from fundamental understanding to practical applications. We investigate the fundamental interactions between SiO 2 NPs and REEs across the full pH range of pH 3 – 10, identifying and mapping the transition of three distinct interaction modes with a combinational of technical tools. We demonstrate the intrinsic, size dependent selectivity, with SiO 2 NPs favoring smaller, more charge dense heavy REEs (HREEs) over larger light REEs (LREEs) in both binary and ternary mixtures under competitive conditions. Our results also show reversible adsorption of REEs on SiO 2 NP surfaces, enabling ligand-free separation processes.
Building upon this mechanistic understanding, we integrate the SiO 2 NP-based platform into three separation processes: (i) solid phase extraction, where SiO 2 NPs act as active adsorbents that enable size-dependent selectivity and reversible capture and release via simple pH-swings, (ii) froth flotation, where SiO 2 NPs serve as REE carrier and foam stabilizer, and (iii) bicontinuous interfacially jammed emulsion gels, where the nanoparticle-stabilized interfaces enable high interfacial area for REE adsorption and extractant loading. This work provides a foundation for developing sustainable REE separation strategies with nanoparticles.

MEAM Seminar: "Harnessing Living Bacteria, Fungi, and Plants as Functional Materials"
2025-09-02 10:15 - 11:15 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
For decades materials engineers have been inspired by biology to create improved properties, for example nacre-inspired hierarchical structures to improve toughness, tree-inspired vasculature to deliver fluids that can react and heal an interface, and mussel-inspired strong underwater adhesives utilizing cation-pi interactions. Now, the bioengineering toolset has reached a maturity where we can start to employ biology directly as materials for the built environment – the mission of the Engineered Living Materials Institute at Cornell. In this seminar, I will highlight several recent projects and then focus on our design and validation of a hybrid living coating that can be applied to conventional structural materials for crack detection. I will describe the development of a bacterial spore–polymer composite coating that enables in situ detection of cracks under different loading modes, geometries, and substrate materials. Excitingly, this biohybrid coating approach unlocks potential, beyond crack detection, for crack mitigation by leveraging the biological component.

Penn AI Seminar Series: Geometric and Physics Stucture Preservation in Scientific Machine Learning
2025-09-02 12:00 - 13:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Geometric and Physics Stucture Preservation in Scientific Machine Learning
Nat Trask, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Penn Engineering, will share about his work constructing real-time digital twins built upon a data-driven finite element exterior calculus; constructing auto-regressive integrators with guaranteed long-term stability independent of rollout length; and constructing data-driven particle models built upon metriplectic bracket theory, which preserve emergent statistical mechanics.
Lunch will be served.
Registration is required. Sign up here.

ASSET Seminar: "Provable vs Impossible Trust: Reasoning, Steering, and Safety"
2025-09-03 12:00 - 13:15 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss a collection of highlights from our recent work in trustworthy AI.
(1) Certifying reasoning explanations with reliability guarantees and aligning with expert knowledge,
(2) Simple yet effective steering inspired from theoretical rule-following mechanisms for transformers, and
(3) The impossibility of monitoring stateless attackers and what safety defenses should be doing.

Seminar Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FNeVVPXb_vZiNWVexFTgTFoVKBM_QnqQ/view?usp=sharing

CBE Seminar: "Water–Hydrophobe Interfaces: From Debunking Myths to Boosting Global Food–Water–Climate Resilience" (Himanshu Mishra, KAUST)
2025-09-03 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu & Chen Auditorium
Abstract:
First, I will outline our work on overcoming barriers to desert rehabilitation for urban greening, landscaping, and regional food security. In arid regions, freshwater is scarce, sandy soils lose water and fertilizers rapidly, which stifles plant growth. Our team has developed two complementary solutions: (i) Superhydrophobic Sand (SHS)1 — a plastic-free, bio-inspired mulch that cuts evaporative water loss from topsoil by ~80%; (ii) CarboSoil2 — an engineered biochar that greatly enhances nutrient and water retention in sandy soils. I will share our translational journey from materials invention and characterization to multi-year field trials with food crops and native plants in collaboration with industry partners. Results show SHS and CarboSoil can dramatically improve irrigation and fertilizer-use efficiency in hot, dry, sandy environments. Terraxy LLC, the startup I co-founded, is now scaling Carbosoil production to 6,000 tons/year for regional sustainability projects (video link).
Next, I will discuss our investigation into controversial claims that hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) forms spontaneously at the air–water interface in microdroplets3-5 — a phenomenon that would upend fundamental physical chemistry and impact fields from cloud chemistry to green synthesis. We tested H₂O₂ formation in sprayed and condensed microdroplets under varied flow rates, air compositions, pH, and salt content. Our findings show that the effect is not due to the air–water interface or microdroplet geometry6. Instead, H₂O₂ originates from the reduction of dissolved oxygen at the solid–water interface7. Within a 50 nM detection limit, no H₂O₂ was detected in oxygen-free conditions (more here).

References

A. Gallo, K. Odokonyero, M. A. A. Mousa, J. Reihmer, S. Al-Mashharawi, R. Marasco, E. Manalastas, M. J. L. Morton, D. Daffonchio, M. F. McCabe, M. Tester and H. Mishra, ACS Agricultural Science & Technology, 2022, 2, 276-288.
K. Odokonyero, B. Vernooij, B. Albar, L. O. Exposito, A. Alsamdani, A. A. G. Haider, N. V. H. Musskopf, N. Kharbatia, A. Gallo and H. Mishra, Frontiers in Plant Science, 2024, Volume 15 – 2024.
M. A. Mehrgardi, M. Mofidfar and R. N. Zare, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2022, 144, 7606-7609.
J. K. Lee, K. L. Walker, H. S. Han, J. Kang, F. B. Prinz, R. M. Waymouth, H. G. Nam and R. N. Zare, P Natl Acad Sci USA, 2019, 116, 19294-19298.
R. A. LaCour, J. P. Heindel, R. Zhao and T. Head-Gordon, J Am Chem Soc, 2025, 147, 6299-6317.
N. H. Musskopf, A. Gallo, P. Zhang, J. Petry and H. Mishra, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2021, 12, 11422-11429.
M. A. Eatoo and H. Mishra, Chem Sci, 2024, 15, 3093-3103.

FOLDS Seminar: Positive random walks and positive-semidefinite random matrices
2025-09-04 12:00 - 13:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 306, 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
On the real line, a random walk that can only move in the positive direction is very unlikely to remain close to its starting point. After a fixed number of steps, the left tail has a Gaussian profile, under minimal assumptions. Remarkably, the same phenomenon occurs when we consider a positive random walk on the cone of positive-semidefinite matrices. After a fixed number of steps, the minimum eigenvalue is also described by a Gaussian model.
This talk introduces a new way to make this intuition rigorous. The methodology provides the solution to an open problem in computational mathematics about sparse random embeddings. The presentation is targeted at a general mathematical audience.

Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: Aoife O'Farrell
2025-09-04 14:00 - 15:00
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Arjun Raj are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Aoife O’Farrell.
Title: Stimulus Specificity of Trained Immune Memory in Human Macrophages
Advisor: Dr. Arjun Raj
Date and Time: Thursday, September 4th at 2:00 PM
Location: Smilow 12-146AB
Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/94438324577
The public is welcome to attend.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: Michael Yao
2025-09-05 11:00 - 12:00
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Drs. Osbert Bastani and James Gee are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Michael Yao.
Title: Distributionally Robust Machine Intelligence
Advisors: Osbert Bastani, PhD and James Gee, PhD
Date & Time: Friday, September 5th at 11am
Location: Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414 (3317 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104)
RSVP Link: https://www.michaelsyao.com/defense
Zoom Link: https://pennmedicine.zoom.us/j/93390061157?pwd=[REDACTED]
The public is welcome to attend.

Future Proof Your Research With Rigor
2025-09-08 15:00 - 16:00 | Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall, 3417 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
What’s the best way to avoid paper retractions and irreproducible results? Conduct rigorous research. Join us for a public talk with Ivan Oransky, Co-Founder of Retraction Watch, Anita Anita Bandrowski, founder of The Research Resource Identification Initiative (RRID), and Jason Williams, Assisant Director of the DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, on doing science that stands the test of time—and scrutiny.
Houston Hall – Bodek Lounge, 3417 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19104
RSVP here to save your spot!

*This event is part of the C4R25 Conference – Sep 8-10 in Philadelphia – the world’s only conference dedicated to research rigor! Learn more at c4r.io/conference

MEAM Seminar: MEAM Faculty Showcase
2025-09-09 10:15 - 11:15 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Please join us on Tuesday, September 9 for an overview of research being done in the MEAM Department, hosted by MEAM Department Chair, Dr. Kevin Turner. This is an excellent opportunity for current graduate students to learn about the breadth of work being done in MEAM. The following faculty will be presenting (not in order of presentation):

ASSET Seminar: "Rethinking Test-Time Thinking: From Token-Level Rewards to Robust Generative Agents"
2025-09-10 12:00 - 13:15 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
We present a unified perspective on test-time thinking as a lens for improving generative AI agents through finer-grained reward modeling, data-centric reasoning, and robust alignment. Beginning with GenARM, we introduce an inductive bias for denser, token-level reward modeling that guides generation during decoding, enabling token-level alignment without retraining. While GenARM targets reward design, ThinkLite-VL focuses on the data side of reasoning. It proposes a self-improvement framework that selects the most informative samples via MCTS-guided search, yielding stronger visual reasoning with fewer labels. Taking this a step further, MORSE-500 moves beyond selection to creation: it programmatically generates targeted, controllable multimodal data to systematically probe and stress-test models’ reasoning abilities. We then interrogate a central assumption in inference-time alignment: Does Thinking More Always Help? Our findings reveal that increased reasoning steps can degrade performance–not due to better or worse reasoning per se, but due to rising variance in outputs, challenging the naive scaling paradigm. Finally, AegisLLM applies test-time thinking in the service of security, using an agentic, multi-perspective framework to defend against jailbreaks, prompt injections, and unlearning attacks–all at inference time. Together, these works chart a path toward generative agents that are not only more capable, but more data-efficient, introspective, and robust in real-world deployment.

Seminar Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13jOKuou0QzqkMo9QHEdoHA1nCIxOPsbm/view?usp=drive_link

Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Tairan He, Carnegie Mellon University & NVIDIA, “Scalable Sim-to-Real Learning for General-Purpose Humanoid Skills”
2025-09-10 15:00 - 16:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.
ABSTRACT
Humanoids represent the most versatile robotic platform, capable of walking, manipulating, and collaborating with people in human-centered environments. Yet, despite recent advances, building humanoids that can operate reliably in the real world remains a fundamental challenge. Progress has been hindered by difficulties in whole-body control, robust perceptive reasoning, and bridging the sim-to-real gap.

In this talk, I will discuss how scalable simulation and learning can systematically overcome these barriers. I will present a research trajectory that advances humanoid capabilities along three dimensions:

1. Sim-to-Real Control: From real-time teleoperation (H2O) to dexterous loco-manipulation (OmniH2O), to a versatile generalist controller (HOVER), and agile transfer via dynamics alignment (ASAP), these works demonstrate increasingly dexterous and adaptable control.
2. Sim-to-Real Perception: With ABS, we show that robust real-world locomotion requires tightly coupling exteroceptive and proprioceptive sensing—shifting sim-to-real learning from blind skill execution to perception-driven control.
3. Future Directions: I will outline potential next steps in (1) Perceptive Loco-Manipulation: end-to-end visuomotor policies unifying perception, locomotion, and manipulation—and (2) Real-to-Sim Evaluation: using high-fidelity simulators environments to provide consistent evaluation protocols and benchmarks for real-world policy evaluation.

Taken together, these works explore how far scalable sim-to-real learning can advance humanoid capabilities across control and perception. While sim-to-real is not the only path toward reliable humanoids, this talk aims to test its limits—probing how scaling simulation and learning can push humanoids closer to functioning as capable partners in real-world environments.

CBE Seminar: "Non-equilibrium Dynamics of Lipid Vesicles using Automated Flow Control" (Charles Schroeder, Princeton University)
2025-09-10 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu & Chen Auditorium
Abstract:
Vesicles are membrane-bound compartments that play a central role in biology. Despite recent progress, the dynamics of single- and multi-component lipid vesicles are not fully understood, particularly far from equilibrium where complex nonspherical shapes undergo large deformations in flow. In this talk, I will present recent work from our group on the non-equilibrium dynamics of lipid vesicles in precisely defined flows using the Stokes trap – a new method that enables full 3D control of position and orientation of molecules or particles using active feedback control, without the need for external optical, magnetic, or electric fields. After characterizing equilibrium properties including bending modulus and membrane tension, we study vesicle deformation as a function of dimensionless flow strength (capillary number, Ca) and vesicle deflation (reduced volume). Our results show that vesicles are remarkably deformable, exhibiting reversible shape changes with aspect ratios exceeding 20 in repeated stretch-relax cycles in the bending-dominated regime. Single-component vesicles show a rich variety of shapes and conformations, including asymmetric and symmetric dumbbells, in addition to pearling, wrinkling, and buckling instabilities, depending on membrane properties. Based on these observations, we construct a detailed flow-phase diagram for vesicles in extensional flow, and we further analyze transient stretching and relaxation dynamics. Two distinct relaxation processes emerge for deformed vesicles, including a fast relaxation process corresponding to bending modes and a slow process governed by membrane tension relaxation. Finally, we study vesicle shape dynamics in time-dependent large-amplitude oscillatory flows, revealing three distinct dynamical regimes – pulsating, reorienting, and symmetrical deformations – arising from the competition between flow and membrane deformation timescales. Together, these results provide new insight into flow-driven shape instabilities for lipid vesicles using new methods in flow automation.

FOLDS seminar: Algorithmic stability for regression and classification
2025-09-11 12:00 - 13:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
In a supervised learning setting, a model fitting algorithm is unstable if small perturbations to the input (the training data) can often lead to large perturbations in the output (say, predictions returned by the fitted model). Algorithmic stability is a desirable property with many important implications such as generalization and robustness, but testing the stability property empirically is known to be impossible in the setting of complex black-box models. In this work, we establish that bagging any black-box regression algorithm automatically ensures that stability holds, with no assumptions on the algorithm or the data. Furthermore, we construct a new framework for defining stability in the context of classification, and show that using bagging to estimate our uncertainty about the output label will again allow stability guarantees for any black-box model. This work is joint with Jake Soloff and Rebecca Willett.

Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722

ESE PhD Thesis Defense - "Design and Characterization of AlScN-Based Ferroelectric Devices for Non-Volatile Memory Applications"
2025-09-11 15:00 - 17:00 | Room 221, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Ferroelectric materials have emerged as promising candidates for next-generation non-volatile memory technologies due to their intrinsic remnant polarization and fast switching dynamics. Among them, aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) stands out for its CMOS compatibility, low growth temperature, exceptional thermal stability and high remnant polarization compared to conventional perovskite and hafnia-based ferroelectrics.
In this dissertation, I present a comprehensive study of AlScN-based ferroelectric devices for non-volatile memory applications. I first demonstrate ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs) by integrating AlScN with 2D materials, where the Sc composition in AlScN is controlled. Through systematic electrical characterization, including current–voltage (I–V), polarization–voltage (P–V) loops, and pulsed positive up negative down (PUND) measurements, I elucidate device physics, endurance, and wake-up/fatigue behavior. By engineering the contact interface, I further realize n-type, p-type, and ambipolar FeFETs with enhanced ferroelectric gating efficiency and substantially improved on-state current.
Next, I investigate highly scaled AlScN-based ferroelectric diodes (Fe-diodes) and highlight their potential for high-density memory integration. Taken together, these studies establish AlScN as a robust material platform for ferroelectric device technologies, bridging fundamental materials science with device- and circuit-level opportunities in memory and beyond.

ESE PhD Thesis Defense - "Learning-based Safe and Robust Control for Multi-Agent Systems"
2025-09-12 12:00 - 13:30 | WYSIWYG
AI-enabled systems have become ubiquitous and integral to safety-critical domains, e.g., autonomous vehicles and aerial robotics. Despite promising empirical results, decision-making processes for critical systems incorporating AI components require careful consideration, as failures may have catastrophic consequences. One key challenge is that various uncertainties will inevitably arise from system limitations, black-box models, or environmental factors, and inaccurate estimation of intrinsic uncertainties or failure to account for other agents in the environment can lead to hazardous behaviors.
In this dissertation, we study how to develop safe and robust learning-based control policies under various uncertainties. In particular, it explores how tools from statistics, game theory and formal methods can empower uncertainty quantification, adaptation to other agents, and robust policy synthesis. The first part focuses on safe learning and control multi-agent systems, where we show how to develop safe, robust, and adaptive control strategies in safety-critical systems when encountering other agents. The second part studies how to synthesize safe perception-based control policy for robotic systems under uncertainties.

ESE PhD Thesis Defense - "Magnetostatic Surface Wave and Surface Acoustic Wave Devices for Tunable and Energy Efficient Radio Frequency Filters"
2025-09-12 13:00 - 14:00 | Greenberg Lounge (Room 114), Skirkanich Hall, 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Tunable and energy-efficient filters are key components in modern wireless communication, where RF front-end systems must operate across multiple frequency bands while minimizing power consumption.
This thesis focuses on the design and fabrication of miniature, narrowband, tunable bandpass and bandstop filters based on magnetostatic waves (MSW) in yttrium iron garnet (YIG) waveguides. A zero-static-power magnetic bias circuit is used to tune the filter’s center frequency, but the compact size of the magnetic bias circuit imposes stringent limits on the YIG waveguide dimensions. To address this challenge, microfabricated YIG thin films with aluminum meander-line transducers were developed. These designs improve the resonator figure of merit, reduce insertion loss, and enhance coupling. Increasing the YIG thickness further improves skirt selectivity, lowers propagation loss, and increases power handling. By integrating wideband tunability with nonreciprocal behavior, a single device can replace multiple RF switches, filters, and isolators, simultaneously controlling passband selection and directional isolation. This integration simplifies RF front-end design by reducing the number of required components.
In parallel, this thesis introduces a high-frequency surface acoustic wave (SAW) platform using aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) on 4H-silicon carbide (SiC). This material system combines high sound velocity, high thermal conductivity, and strong piezoelectric response. Furthermore, the acoustoelectric effect (AE) was harnessed to achieve nonreciprocal RF amplification. A proof-of-concept AE delay line was realized by integrating Sezawa-mode SAWs in AlScN/SiC with ion-implanted SiC, supporting future applications for energy efficient RF amplifiers.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: Brian-Tinh D. Vu
2025-09-13 10:00 - 11:00
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Chamith Rajapakse are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Brian-Tinh D. Vu.
Title: “Rapid, High-resolution, and Signal-efficient Methods for the Clinical Translation of Bone Magnetic Resonance Imaging”
Date: Wednesday, September 17th
Time: 10:00 AM
Location: BRB 1412
Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/99746435550?pwd=[REDACTED]
The public is welcome to attend.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: Georgios Mentzelopoulos
2025-09-15 12:30 - 14:30
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Flavia Vitale are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Georgios Mentzelopoulos.
Title: From thoughts to actions: cracking the neural code across scales and modalities
Advisor: Dr. Flavia Vitale
Date: Monday, September 15th
Time: 12:30 PM- 2:30 PM
Location: 225 Towne Building
The public is welcome to attend.

MEAM Seminar: "Micro-surgical Tools for Dissecting Cells and Tissues"
2025-09-16 10:15 - 11:15 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Wound healing is an essential biological process for maintaining homeostasis and, ultimately, for survival. We investigate the mechanisms underlying extreme wound healing in Stentor coeruleus, a single-celled organism, capable of recovering from drastic membrane wounds exceeding half of the cell surface. This talk focuses on our recent effort on developing a microfluidic platform for the manipulation and reproducible wounding of the cell. We demonstrate a microfluidic “guillotine” for bisecting cells in a continuous flow, and a “SMORES” platform to immobilize the cells for laser ablation. We further discuss the extension of the tool for dissecting live tumors to generate organoids that preserve the tumor immune microenvironment for applications including the testing of immunotherapy on a chip.

ASSET Seminar: "Symbolic Reasoning in the Age of Large Language Models"
2025-09-17 12:00 - 13:15 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Today, reasoning is commonly interpreted as large language models generating chains of thought. Yet historically, AI reasoning had a very different meaning: executing algorithms that manipulated symbols to perform logical or probabilistic deduction and derive definite answers to questions about knowledge. In this talk, I show that such old-fashioned ideas are very relevant to reasoning with large language models today. In particular, I will demonstrate that integrating symbolic reasoning algorithms directly into the architecture of language models enables state-of-the-art capabilities in controllable text generation, alignment, and mathematical reasoning. These capabilities are built on top of tractable probabilistic circuit models that approximate the distribution of the large language model’s future behavior, and allow for efficient reasoning on the GPU. I will further show that the same ideas naturally extend to neurosymbolic offline reinforcement learning and image diffusion.

Seminar Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PF5GxivBHKiloFdKTv59NMae5dtXDzSk/view?usp=sharing

CBE Seminar: "Natural Product Research for Human Health and Biocatalysis" (Wenjun Zhang, UC Berkeley)
2025-09-17 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu & Chen Auditorium
Abstract:
Natural products are historically great sources of human medicines, but their impacts are well beyond their use as drugs. In addition to well-known producers like environmental microbes and plants, the human microbiome is an emerging source of new natural products that often correlate with health or disease. There is an urgent need for the experimental characterization of these abundant, yet poorly understood, molecules and the downstream socio-chemical relationships they mediate. In the first half of my lecture, I will introduce efforts from my group on the discovery and functional study of new bioactive natural products, particularly from the human oral microbiome. In the second half, I will discuss our work on understanding natural product biosynthesis, which makes it possible to produce more bioactive natural products and their analogs via synthetic biology and yield useful enzymes for biocatalysis. Our recent efforts on discovering and characterizing N-N bond-forming enzymes will be highlighted.

MSE Seminar: 1D Topological Systems for Next-Generation Electronics - Judy J. Cha - Cornell University
2025-09-18 10:30 - 12:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Topological nanowires, topological materials confined in one dimension (1D), hold great promise for robust and scalable quantum computing and low-dissipation interconnect applications, which will transform current computing technologies. To do so, research in topological nanowires must continue to improve their synthesis and properties.
In this talk, I will discuss my group’s efforts to develop a high throughput and precision synthesis method to fabricate 1D topological systems. We employ recently developed thermomechanical nanomolding to extrude single crystal nanowires of topological materials with controlled diameter. I will highlight our transport studies on topological semimetal nanowires for their potential application as extremely scaled, low-resistance interconnects. We demonstrate that the resistivity scaling of topological semimetal nanowires is superior to those of the state-of-the-art Cu interconnects and Cu alternative metals, presenting them as viable candidates for the low-resistance interconnect applications.

FOLDS seminar: Heaviside Composite Optimization: A new paradigm of optimization
2025-09-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722

A Heaviside function is an indicator function of a semi-infinite interval. A Heaviside composite function is a Heaviside function composed with a multivariate function that may be nonsnooth. This talk presents a touch of this novel class of discontinuous optimization problems that borders on continuous and discrete optimization. Among the rich applications of such problems, we mention one pertaining to classification and treatment with constraints solvable by an elementary yet novel progressive integer programming (PIP) method that can be applied broadly to many other problems,​ including indefinite quadratic programs and linear programs with linear​ complementarity constraints. Computational results demonstrate the excellent​ performance of the PIP idea and its superiority over a full integer programming approach.

AI Research Mixer 2025
2025-09-19 08:00 - 17:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Auditorium, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Event Date: Friday, September 19, 2025
Time: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Event Location: Amy Gutmann Hall Auditorium

Hosted by:
ASSET Center for Trustworthy AI
IDEAS Innovation in Data Engineering and Science
The Warren Center for Network & Data Sciences
DDDI Data Driven Discovery Initiative
Penn AI

Event Description:
Please join us for a full day of faculty talks, poster presentations, and networking opportunities with members of ASSET, IDEAS, Warren, DDDI and Penn AI to learn about the wide range of AI research happening here at Penn.
All Penn community members who have interest in AI are welcome!

Catering will be provided throughout the day, including a light reception following the final talks.

Click here for the event schedule.

[VIRTUAL SPEAKER]: Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Max Welling, University of Amsterdam & CuspAI, "On the Role of Uncertainty in Automating the Scientific Process with AI"
2025-09-19 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This event will have a VIRTUAL SPEAKER. Streaming will be in-person only in Wu and Chen.
ABSTRACT
We are in the middle of a transformation of the scientific process. AI is now rapidly automating scientific discovery by accelerating scientific simulation and optimisation. For example, we can now shortcut expensive quantum mechanical calculations such as DFT with much faster machine learned interatomic potentials and forces, numerically “solve” PDEs with neural networks, or accelerate experimental design with Bayesian optimisation. However, in both applications of AI the role of uncertainty is key because ML models can only be trusted in regions of input space where it has seen data. Extrapolating too far away from the data runs the risk of a large prediction error that goes unnoticed. In this talk I will first provide a high level overview of the increasingly important role of AI in science, and then proceed with introducing a new efficient Variational Bayesian method for uncertainty quantification. I will show the effectiveness of this method on PDE solving and molecular generation (BARNN) and on ML interatomic potentials and forces (BLIP).

PICS Colloquium: Enabling computationally efficient first-principles kinetic simulations in nanoporous catalysts using machine learning and data science with Brandon Bukowski
2025-09-19 14:00 - 15:00 | PICS Conference Room 534 – A Wing , 5th Floor, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Machine learning tools have tremendous potential to accelerate computationally complex physics-based simulations. One example is the need to accelerate materials discovery through first-principles Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations.
This seminar will encompass how machine learning interatomic potentials accelerate the discovery of crystalline nanoporous solids such as zeolites and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that are employed in a wide range of catalytic processes due in part to their tunable micro-environments. Kinetics at intracrystalline sites can be modified by changing pore size, pore architecture, or polarity. These environments impart shape-selectivity that preferentially stabilizes transition states, but the large design space including pore architecture, polarity, and catalytic active site identity preclude comprehensive kinetic studies. DFT describes the electronic states of reactive intermediates and transition states but cannot access the longer length scales necessary to quantify the fluxionality of coadsorbed species or solvents. Classical simulations can accurately simulate these conformational changes but require parameterized values. Machine learning interatomic potentials have emerged as a technique to derive parameterized models from DFT data, and our aim is to adapt these models to predict the entropy and diffusion of reactive intermediates in nanoporous catalysts.

MEAM Seminar: "Nature in Motion: Unraveling Locomotion across Mediums and Scales"
2025-09-23 10:15 - 11:15 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Biology and Engineering form an interdisciplinary two-way street. On the one side, natural solutions can inform and inspire the design of mechanical systems. This is referred to as bioinspired design. On the other side, referred to as engineering-enabled biology, controlled engineering experimental, numerical, and analytical tools are used and developed to answer fundamental biological questions that would be difficult or even impossible to answer directly using natural systems. This talk will introduce several examples of bioinspired multifunctional structures, such as feather-inspired flow control devices. Flow control devices on birds’ wings offer a pathway to advance the design of small aerial vehicles and inform flight control for airborne energy harvesters. In addition to bioinspired engineering, I will highlight a few examples of engineering-enabled biology, such as revealing the physics governing the aerial-aquatic transition of flying fish and the mechanism that enables click beetles’ legless jumping. These research topics demonstrate how nature can inform new locomotion, actuation, and control strategies in mechanical systems, highlighting that engineering analysis can provide valuable insights into nature’s locomotion and adaptation strategies.

ESE Fall Seminar - "Architectures, Topologies and Control for High-Frequency Power Electronics"
2025-09-23 11:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Power converters designed for higher frequency operation than conventional designs can be smaller and lighter. However, to gain these benefits and maintain high reliability the converters also need to be more efficient, as smaller converters offer less surface area for heat removal. The development of efficient, small and light weight power converters can benefit from converter architectures that leverage novel topologies and control techniques. Using examples from my group’s research on compact and high-efficiency power converters, this talk will highlight the opportunities and challenges at the frontiers of high-frequency power electronics. One focus of the talk will be on new power electronic converter architectures that target high power densities and high efficiencies for wide operating range applications. Another focus of the talk will be on emerging power electronic enabled applications, including wireless power transfer systems suitable for powering in-motion mobile platforms and radio-frequency power amplifiers for compact particle accelerators. The talk will also identify directions for future work in the area of high performance power electronic converters.
