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    • Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Martin Nisser, University of Washington, “Computational Fabrication and Assembly for In Situ Manufacturing”

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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 The space environment is remote and unpredictable, and the ability to manufacture in situ offers unique opportunities to address new challenges as they arise. However, the challenges faced in space are often mirrored on Earth. In hospitals, disaster […]

    CBE Seminar: “Engineering Soft Matter Systems through the Lens of Plant Physiology” (Jean-François Louf, Auburn University)

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    Abstract: Plants sense local pressure changes in their vasculature and transmit them across tissues via poroelastic coupling, triggering ionic currents in distant mechanosensitive cells to guide growth and biochemical responses. Inspired by this natural mechanotransduction, my lab develops synthetic analogs across soft materials. I will first present a soft robotic skin that mimics plant vasculature, […]

    MSE Seminar : “Semiconducting Materials for Opto/Bioelectronic Applications; Chemistry, Processing and Device Engineering” Antonio Facchetti – Georgia Institute of Technology

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

    In this presentation we report the realization of novel semiconductor materials, as well as thin-film processing and morphology engineering, for flexible and stretchable organic electronic devices such as thin film transistors, solar cells, electrolyte gated transistors, sensors and neuromorphic circuits. On material development, we present “soft” small-molecules and polymers by co-polymerizing pi-deconjugated building blocks, properly […]

    FOLDS seminar: Learning in Strategic Queuing

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

    Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722   Over the last two decades we have developed good understanding how to quantify the impact of strategic user behavior on outcomes in many games (including traffic routing and online auctions) and showed that the resulting bounds extend to repeated games assuming players use a form of learning (no-regret learning) to adapt to […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Microfabricated devices for in-vivo sensing for mitochondrial assessment”

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    Room 221, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Monitoring of oxygen concentration in biological tissues is essential for understanding cellular metabolism, mitochondrial function, and tissue regeneration. Mitochondrial dysfunction is linked to a wide range of metabolic and degenerative diseases, yet current diagnostic approaches lack the capability to continuously measure oxygen and metabolite dynamics in vivo. This work introduces an implantable electrochemical sensor platform […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Jan Peters, Technische Universität Darmstadt & German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, “Inductive Biases for Robot Learning”

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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 The quest for intelligent robots capable of learning complex behaviors from limited data hinges critically on the design and integration of inductive biases—structured assumptions that guide learning and generalization. In this talk, Jan Peters explores the foundational role of inductive biases in robot […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Multiplying the Coolness of Gels: Messy Networks, Double Networks, and More”

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

    Many materials we eat, spread, squeeze, or 3D print are gels, soft amorphous solids whose solid component comprises self-assembled networks of particles, fibers, or agglomerates of proteins, polymers, and colloids. The space between and within human cells is permeated by self-assembled gel networks, the extra-cellular matrix and the cytoskeleton, whose self- organization and heterogeneity is […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “Developing Custom Portable Low-Field MRI for Point-of-Care Imaging”

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

    MRI remains the gold standard in neuroimaging, but its high costs, large footprint, and infrastructure requirements limit deployment in many settings—including intensive care units (ICUs), emergency vehicles, and neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). These challenges demand portable, low-cost MRI systems specifically engineered for operation in space- and power-limited environments. Rather than adapting commercial scanners, our […]

    Penn AI Presents: “How Brains and Machines Solve the Binding Problem”

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

    Despite decades of research, we still do not know how the brain integrates the many features of an object into a coherent whole, or whether artificial systems perform similar binding. In our first study, we find that large self-supervised vision transformers spontaneously develop a low-dimensional “same-object” representation that predicts whether two image patches belong to […]

    CIS Seminar: “Diffusion Generative Models for Non-Euclidean Data”

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

    As a major powerhorse for generative AI, diffusion models have demonstrated great successes in Euclidean spaces, such as for generating images and videos. This talk, on the other hand, will focus on a more nascent aspect, namely non-Euclidean diffusion models. One can for example consider the generative modeling of data that are discrete, living on […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Mechanical Behavior and Fracture of Fibrous Materials at Large Deformations”

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    Towne 227 (MEAM Conference Room) 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    The mechanical behavior of fiber network materials is characterized by large deformations before failure and a strain-stiffening stress-strain response. In this thesis, this is investigated using discrete simulations at the microstructural level along with theoretical and computational results from continuum models. Cauchy and first Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensors for discrete networks of central-force elements are defined […]

    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 […]