ASSET Seminar: Machine Learning: A Data-Centric Perspective, Aleksander Madry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2023-04-12 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT:
The training data that modern machine learning models ingest has a major impact on these models’ performance (as well as failures). Yet, this impact tends to be neither fully appreciated nor understood at a fine-grained enough level.
In this talk, we will discuss some of the key ways in which training data influences not only what but also how models “learn” as well as tools to dissect this influence. In particular, we will present a new framework—called datamodeling—for directly casting predictions as functions of training data and the corresponding model class. This framework enables us to perform a range of model class-driven data analysis, including discovery of subpopulations, quantifying brittleness of model predictions, and diagnosing other shortcomings of the training set.

Spring 2023 GRASP SFI: Wenzhong Yan, UCLA, "Mechanical Intelligence for Compliant Robots"
2023-04-12 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. This week’s presenter will be in-person as well.
ABSTRACT
Biological systems with deformable bodies exhibit remarkable abilities. However, compliant/soft robots still can not match the capabilities of their biological analogs in terms of adaptability, physical robustness, and autonomy partially due to the reliance on rigid, bulky silicon-based electronics. My research aims to address this challenge by creating self-sustained, autonomous soft machines through Mechanical Intelligence (MI) — embedding necessary functionalities into compliant materials and structures — with minimal or even no silicon-based electronics. The resulting material-like soft robots can behave like biological organisms, obtaining energy from the ambiance, moving on various terrains, and surviving extreme conditions, which may find applications in environment monitoring, rescue, exploration, human-machine interaction, education, etc.
In this talk, I will demonstrate the power of MI by achieving locomotion and autonomous interaction with the environment of soft robots in compliant origami materials and structures with high robustness to adversarial events, e.g., radiation and physical deformation. Firstly, I will show how to realize self-sustained oscillation by incorporating bistable mechanisms and conductive artificial muscles without discrete components or electronic control hardware. This oscillation can be used to generate locomotion for robots with only constant electrical power. Then, I will present an efficient method to rapidly design such oscillators from desired behavioral specifications, i.e. frequency. This method provides a powerful tool for facilitating the modeling, designing, and prototyping of such complicated dynamic compound systems. I will also introduce a method to achieve complete sense-decide-act loops in compliant materials for autonomous interaction with environments, demonstrated with several robots. I will close my talk with a preview of how to use MI to improve adaptability and convert/harvest environmental energy to power robots, toward achieving my ultimate goal of creating self-sustained soft robots to allow their widespread deployment into complex, extreme environments to perform challenging tasks.

Seminar: Accelerating Clean Energy Technologies: Pathways to Commercial Liftoff
2023-04-12 17:00 - 19:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
5:00 PM
Wu and Chen Auditorium

Anna Siefken
Department of Energy
Office of Technology Transitions

President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act provided DOE billions of dollars to invest in and support large-scale demonstration and deployment of clean energy technologies over the next decade. These historic investments are intended to drive commercialization and unlock trillions in private investment to set the nation on a course to hit critical long-term decarbonization objectives while creating high quality American jobs, strengthening domestic supply chains and global competitiveness, and facilitating an equitable energy transition. By 2030, DOE reports that cumulative investments must increase from approximately $40 billion to $300 billion across the hydrogen, nuclear, long duration energy storage, and carbon management sectors. DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) is responsible for technology commercialization and engagement with the business and industrial
sectors across the United States.

On March 8, 2023, the DOE announced a Partnership with the Edison Electric Institute, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Long Duration Energy Storage Council to support the development and domestic manufacture of long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies that can meet all U.S. market demands by 2030 with the goal of reducing the cost of grid-scale energy storage by 90% for systems that deliver 10+ hours of duration. With input from industry, investors, academics, and other stakeholders, the OTT prepared “Liftoff Reports” for emerging clean energy technologies which provide constant updates on market conditions, technology advances, governance issues, and community concerns. DOE also encourages direct public input, which can be submitted via email to liftoff@hq.doe.gov.
Reception to follow sponsored by the Environmental Innovations Initiative.

Seminar Flyer

MSE Seminar: "'Low Dimensional' Rare-Earth-Free Permanent Magnetic Materials" (University of California, Riverside)
2023-04-13 10:30 - 12:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Critical elements such as rare-earth (RE) metals that are subject to supply risks and are incorporated in critical materials, play a central role in the function of these materials. They dictate the properties that control the function of critical materials, including both molecules and materials, used in a broad range of technologically important and energy relevant properties such as superconductivity, magnetism, quantum phenomena, light generation, magnetocaloric behavior, and catalytic activity. It is of high importance to the Department of Energy (DOE) to enable the discovery and design of alternatives to critical materials that reduce or eliminate the need for critical elements. In this seminar, I will present our recent research focused on “designing” new quasi low-dimensional rare-earth-free magnetic materials, and new van-der-Waals (vdW) crystals showing both high Curie temperatures and large magnetic anisotropy as well as efficient spin-orbit torque. Furthermore, I will present a new reaction developed in our group that enables the synthesis of some of these materials at the nanoscale, a major step toward fulfilling their huge potential.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Generation of Chimeric Antigen Receptor Macrophages to Target Pathogenic Protein Aggregates in Alzheimer’s Disease” (Matias Porras Paniagua)
2023-04-13 15:15 - 17:00 | Smilow Center for Translational Research in SCTR 11-146AB
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Drs. Saar Gill & Frederick Bennett are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Matias Porras Paniagua.

Title: Generation of Chimeric Antigen Receptor Macrophages to Target Pathogenic Protein Aggregates in Alzheimer’s Disease
Date: April 13, 2023
Time: 3:15pm
Location: Smillow Center for Translational Medicine: SCTR 11-146AB
Optional Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96832299770

The public is welcome to attend.

BE Seminar: "MAPing Principles and Applications to Endogenous Repair" (Tatiana Segura, Duke University)
2023-04-13 15:30 - 16:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This seminar will be held in person in Glandt Forum; snacks will be served.
“MAPing Principles and Applications to Endogenous Repair”
Microporous annealed particle (MAP) scaffolds are materials composed of hydrogel microparticle (HMP) building blocks. Thus, rather than use polymers as the building block that form the hydrogel, we use particles. This makes MAP scaffolds granular materials, which open unique properties such as inner porosity, exterior porosity, injectability, and heterogeneity. We have found that these properties make MAP uniquely suited for applications in tissue regeneration applications. We have found that simple changes in the MAP composition can have dramatic changes in the immune response to the material and subsequent regenerative healing response. This talk will cover the concept of MAP, software that we have developed to understand MAP microstructure, and some of our findings that relate the immune response and regenerative healing.

Spring 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Luca Carlone, MIT, “Next-Generation Robot Perception: Hierarchical Representations, Certifiable Algorithms, and Self-Supervised Learning”
2023-04-13 15:30 - 17:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week’s presenter will be in-person as well.

ABSTRACT
Spatial perception —the robot’s ability to sense and understand the surrounding environment— is a key enabler for robot navigation, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Recent advances in perception algorithms and systems have enabled robots to create large-scale geometric maps of unknown environments and detect objects of interest. Despite these advances, a large gap still separates robot and human perception: Humans are able to quickly form a holistic representation of the scene that encompasses both geometric and semantic aspects, are robust to a broad range of perceptual conditions, and are able to learn without low-level supervision. This talk discusses recent efforts to bridge these gaps. First, we show that scalable metric-semantic scene understanding requires hierarchical representations; these hierarchical representations, or 3D scene graphs, are key to efficient storage and inference, and enable real-time perception algorithms. Second, we discuss progress in the design of certifiable algorithms for robust estimation; in particular we discuss the notion of “estimation contracts”, which provide first-of-a-kind performance guarantees for estimation problems arising in robot perception. Finally, we observe that certification and self-supervision are twin challenges, and the design of certifiable perception algorithms enables a natural self-supervised learning scheme; we apply this insight to 3D object pose estimation and present self-supervised algorithms that perform on par with state-of-the-art, fully supervised methods, while not requiring manual 3D annotations.

PICS Colloquium: "Bridging scales in aerosol modeling with particle-resolved simulations"
2023-04-14 14:00 - 15:00 | PICS Conference Room 534 – A Wing , 5th Floor, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The aerosol lifecycle consists of processes that act on the micro-scale, yet the aerosols’ climate impacts are perceived on regional or global scales. Capturing this multiscale nature of the atmospheric aerosol poses considerable challenges for aerosol models since computational constraints limit the detail of aerosol representation, yet these details matter in determining large-scale aerosol impacts. This presentation will illustrate how high-detail, particle-resolved simulations can serve as a bridge between scales in aerosol modeling. The particle-resolved approach represents the aerosol using individual computational particles that evolve in size and composition as they undergo aging processes in the atmosphere. While computationally expensive, this approach is therefore not limited by assumptions about particle composition within a given size range and can represent the full aerosol mixing state. My presentation will show how this modeling approach, leveraged by machine learning, can efficiently bridge from the process scale to the global scale. I will present a summary of our knowledge to what extent simplifying the diversity of aerosol composition introduces errors in our estimates of cloud condensation nuclei concentration and aerosol optical properties. I’ll conclude by highlighting the unique measurement challenges that we face in constraining these models but that provide an unprecedented opportunity in “getting the right answer for the right reasons.”

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: "Leveraging Models to Improve Data Efficiency: Navigation, Reinforcement Learning, and Lie Group Convolutions"
2023-04-17 14:00 - 15:00 | Greenberg Lounge (Room 114), Skirkanich Hall, 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Consider a system which takes data as an input, processes the data with a model, and outputs a decision for a particular objective. We call the measure of the amount of data used to complete the objective with some performance metric as data efficiency. Across many domains, it is advantageous to reduce the amount of data to achieve the same or better level of performance. In this thesis, we exploit the model of the system in order to improve the data efficiency across three distinct domains of interest: robot navigation in ellipsoidal worlds, reinforcement learning, and Lie group convolutions.

MEAM Seminar: "Nano and Polymers and Mechanics and Data"
2023-04-18 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
For polymer composites, nanocomposites and polymer thin film systems, the local properties of polymers can be altered by the chemical and physical interactions with substrates and embedded particles over a length scales exceeding 100nm. The mechanisms and impact of confined polymers remains still an active area of research and debate. Here we will review methods to explore nanoscale polymer properties near surfaces, with a focus on scanning probe methods to quantitatively measure mechanical response and the interesting mechanics problems that arise. In multiphase soft materials, local changes in the sample modulus, tip-sample interactions and stress field interaction effects impact the acquired force curves. Coupling experimental data with simulations of indentations enable the structural effects of the particle-polymer-tip system to be accurately estimated and removed, revealing the effects of confinement on property gradients. Capturing and archiving this data allows case studies which connect the property-structure-property domains through a combination of machine learning and physics-based modeling. We demonstrate the ability to identify the most critical features influence properties and the ability to acquire new insights from ensembles of unrelated data. The importance of data, data resources and leverage of this knowledge in new physics based and interpretable machine learning methods is discussed. Overall this work illustrates new approaches combining physics and data based models and experiments to tackle materials design principles for the complex, high dimensional problems inherent in the multi-phase polymer space.

Future Leaders in Mechanobiology: Piere Rodriguez Aliaga
2023-04-19 11:00 - 12:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
Launched in May 2021, the Future Leaders in Mechanobiology is a monthly seminar series featuring up-and-coming leaders in mechanobiology–PhD students and postdocs from a wide range of fields, backgrounds, and institutions. By providing an international stage to share one’s work and opportunities to interact with researchers at all career stages, we aim to create an inclusive and valuable series for early-stage researchers and the mechanobiology community as a whole.
Future Leaders in Mechanobiology will meet via Zoom on the third Wednesday of the month, at 11am ET (8am PT, 10am CT), and all are welcome to attend. Recordings of past talks and the future schedule can be found below.
Register here: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98208519228?pwd=[REDACTED]

ASSET Seminar: Thinking fast with Transformers – Algorithmic Reasoning via Shortcuts (Surbhi Goel, University of Pennsylvania)
2023-04-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
PRESENTATION ABSTRACT:
In this new era of deep learning, the emergent algorithmic reasoning capabilities of Transformer models have led to significant advancements in natural language processing, program synthesis, and theorem proving. Despite their widespread success, the underlying reasons for their efficacy and the nature of their internal representations remain elusive. In this talk, we take the lens of learning the dynamics of finite-state machines (automata) as the underlying algorithmic reasoning task and shed light on how shallow, non-recurrent Transformer models emulate these recurrent dynamics. By employing tools from circuit complexity and semigroup theory, we characterize “shortcut” solutions that allow a shallow Transformer to precisely replicate $T$ computational steps of an automaton with only $o(T)$ layers. We show that Transformers are efficiently able to represent these “shortcuts” using their parameter-efficient ability to compute sparse functions and averages. Furthermore, through synthetic experiments, we confirm that standard training successfully discovers these shortcuts. We conclude with highlighting the brittleness of these “shortcuts” in out-of-distribution scenarios.
This talk is based on joint work with Bingbin Liu, Jordan T. Ash, Akshay Krishnamurthy, and Cyril Zhang.

CIS Presents: "A Celebration of Norman Badler’s Legacy at Penn"
2023-04-19 13:30 - 17:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

Spring 2023 GRASP SFI: Jeffrey Lipton, Northeastern University, "Robotics and Digital Manufacturing"
2023-04-19 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. This week’s presenter will be in-person as well.
ABSTRACT
Robotics and manufacturing are intricately linked. Each new generation of robotic fabrication tools has transformed manufacturing, enabling greater complexity and customization of the world around us. With the recent developments in additive manufacturing new forms of mechanical metamaterials have become possible, changing how we make our robotic devices. In this talk we will explore how we can use robots to create novel materials and manufacturing methods, and how we can use novel materials and manufacturing methods to enhance the capabilities of robots? I will demonstrate a mathematical framework for making torque responsive materials, and how these materials form the basis for low-cost robotics. We will explore how 3D printing can enable use to rapidly repurpose robotic systems to solve pressing manufacturing needs, and finally how mobile robotics can enable us to make new forms of scalable manufacturing solutions.

CBE Quinn Distinguished Lecture: "Reclaiming Engineering in the Minds of the Public: The Unheralded, Underappreciated, and Misunderstood Method that Built our Modern World" (Bill Hammack, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
2023-04-19 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Naively the public assumes the products of engineers arise from the scientific method, as reflected in an old joke among engineers about the relationship of science and engineering: “if it’s a success, then it’s a scientific miracle, if a disaster, then an engineering failure.” This joke highlights that successful technologies are invisible: The hallmark of good engineering is invisibility — we rarely think of our furnace, or a jet’s engine, or the purity of a pharmaceutical because the methods to manufacture all these have been honed to perfection. This, though, also hides the creative work of engineers because the public assumes the secret of engineering lies in the mastery of arcane realms of knowledge — sophisticated calculus and powerful computing science implemented by a dispassionate, almost mechanical person — yet the power of engineers to change the world lies in their method, a method used long before sophisticated mathematics and computers. This talk lifts the veil to show, in all its glory, the engineering method, which, once understood, highlights the creativity of engineers, demonstrates their work is the pinnacle of human reasoning, and lays a foundation about how to think about technology — how to decide its proper use and aid it in fulfilling its promise. Using rich examples, this talk strips bare the tools often confused for the engineering method – scientific knowledge, mathematical manipulation – to expose what lies at the heart of the method: a surprisingly simple notion called a “rule of thumb.”
Bio:
Bill Hammack is a Grainger Distinguished Chair in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a B.S. at Michigan Technological University, and a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — all in chemical engineering. He taught for a decade at Carnegie-Mellon University before returning to the University of Illinois where he has taught since 1998. From August 2005 to August 2006 he served as a Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. His work focuses on explaining engineering and technology to the general public. For a decade he broadcast commentaries on public radio, and over the last decade has developed a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers and over seventy million views. His work has been recognized with awards from a diverse group of engineering and science societies, including the “trifecta” of science journalism: the Science in Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers, the Grady-Stack Award from the American Chemical Society, and the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics. And most recently the Council of Scientific Society President’s Carl Sagan Award for the Public Appreciation of Science, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Ralph Coats Roe Medal, and the Hoover Medal, awarded by a collection of engineering societies. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022.

MEAM Master's Thesis Defense: "Preliminary Design of an Origami-Inspired Pulmonary Artery Band"
2023-04-20 10:00 - 11:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Every year, infants are born with life-threatening congenital heart defects that need to be corrected with reconstructive heart surgery. In cases where blood flow through the main pulmonary artery is excessive, patients typically undergo palliative treatments such as pulmonary artery banding, which aims to reduce this blood flow to a more manageable level. While traditional pulmonary artery banding has improved the survivability of infants with this affliction, it often requires more than two open heart surgeries to be successful due to patient growth, loosening of the band, and other complications. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel, multistable pulmonary artery band inspired by origami. In addition to being cost effective and simple to deploy, this novel pulmonary artery band can be configured for magnetic control to reach its multiple stable states, potentially eliminating the need for more than two open heart surgeries for pulmonary artery banding treatment. This work details the preliminary design process of this pulmonary artery band. We begin by examining the properties of its origami fold pattern and how the device is fabricated. Next, we mechanically characterize the fold pattern and use these measurements to inform the design of magnetic infrastructure to enable magnetic untethered control. We then cover the design of a mock circulation loop developed for simulating blood flow in a patient’s body. Finally, we assess the pulmonary artery band’s ability to constrict flow through simulated in-vivo testing with the mock circulation loop. Through this testing, we were able to demonstrate proof of concept of the proposed device functioning as a pulmonary artery band.

MSE Seminar: "Controlling Phase Separation in Elastomeric (Poly)peptides in the Production of Micro-and Nano-Structured Materials" (University of Delaware)
2023-04-20 10:30 - 12:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Macromolecular materials that are capable of selectively and efficiently localizing cells, factors, and/or drugs offer important approaches for mediating biological events and in the development of hybrid materials. We have employed a combination of biosynthetic tools, bioconjugation strategies, and biomimetic assembly to produce thermoresponsive (poly)peptides derived from sequences of resilin, elastin, and collagen. These materials can be designed to control localization of biomolecules with tunable microscale mechanics, and materials with select properties have demonstrated promise for healing vascular graft materials in vivo. In addition, these types of materials not only show controllable micro- and nanoscale morphologies, but also have promise for targeted drug delivery to damaged tissue in vivo.

BE Seminar: "Opportunities and Support for the BME Research Community from NSF" (Laurel Kuxhaus, NSF)
2023-04-20 15:30 - 16:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This seminar will be held in person in Glandt Forum; snacks will be served.
“Opportunities and Support for the BME Research Community from NSF”
The National Science Foundation (NSF) supports work in all fields of science and engineering, including biomedical engineering. That said, biomedical engineering researchers can face challenges in finding the right ‘home’ and scope for their work at NSF. This presentation will provide a broad overview of the mission of NSF and how it relates to the biomedical engineering community, including emerging initiatives and responses to the current disruption of the research enterprise. Descriptions of select programs at the National Science Foundation that fund work relevant to the biomedical engineering community will be covered. Best practices in proposal preparation and practical tips to optimize interaction with your program director will also be discussed. Bring your questions along!

MEAM Seminar: "Design, Characterization, and Fabrication of Low-Cost, Passive, and Biodegradable Sensors for Precision Agriculture"
2023-04-21 10:00 - 11:00 | Moore 212
With the global population projected to reach 9.1 billion people by 2050 there is a need to develop highly efficient agricultural systems that can reliably maximize crop yield. Precision Agriculture (PA) systems enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) offer a potential solution through improvements in labor, resource, and time efficiency to improve agricultural output. PA systems enable this by providing a detailed understanding of the state of the field (e.g., soil moisture, pH, temperature, etc.) so that these resources can be properly deployed spatially and temporally. To realize these systems, sensors that give information about the state of the field are required. However, for the technology to be scalable and practically implemented, these sensors must balance performance and cost. These requirements limit the materials and methods that can be used to develop the technology, including many that are common in modern sensor development. Additionally, the challenge of biocompatibility and biodegradability must be addressed.In this talk, a passive RF sensing system is presented for the detection of soil moisture. This sensing system is developed on a fully biodegradable cellulose nanofibril (CNF) based composite substrate that can used for the rapid fabrication of high fidelity electrical structures via screen printing. The surface, electrical, and diffusion properties of the substrate are characterized. By utilizing screen printing, capacitive structures are fabricated that can detect moisture content over a wide range of humidity and soil moisture conditions.

Spring 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Vivienne Sze, MIT, "Efficient Computing for Autonomy and Navigation"
2023-04-21 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom. This week’s presenter will be virtual.

ABSTRACT
A broad range of next-generation applications will be enabled by low-energy autonomous vehicles including insect-size flapping wing robots that can help with search and rescue, chip-size satellites that can explore nearby stars, and blimps that can stay in the air for years to provide communication services in remote locations. Autonomy capabilities for these vehicles will be unlocked by building their computers from the ground up, and by co-designing the algorithms and hardware for autonomy and navigation. In this talk, I will present various methods, algorithms, and computing hardware that deliver significant improvements in energy consumption and processing speed for tasks such as visual-inertial navigation, depth estimation, motion planning, mutual-information-based exploration, and deep neural networks for robot perception. We will also discuss the importance of efficient computing to reduce carbon emissions for sustainable large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles.
Much of the work presented in this talk was developed in the Low-Energy Autonomy and Navigation (LEAN) interdisciplinary group at MIT (http://lean.mit.edu), which is co-directed by Vivienne Sze and Sertac Karaman.

PSOC Seminar: "Leveraging dynamic biomaterials platforms to elucidate mechanisms of mechanical memory in disease and aging" (Christopher Madl, Penn)
2023-04-24 13:00 - 14:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Spring 2023 Hybrid-Seminar Series
Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST)
Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge
“For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu>”

MEAM Seminar: “Laboratory Investigations of Wind Turbine Wakes at Field Reynolds Numbers”
2023-04-25 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Wind turbines and wind farms present unique challenges—fluid mechanically—as they combine extremely high Reynolds numbers with additional time scales imposed by the rotation, and three-dimensional effects. This implies that resolved numerical solutions are too computationally expensive and investigations in conventional wind tunnels are impossible due to the flow speeds and rotational rates needed in order to satisfy the dynamic similarity requirements. At Princeton, we achieve the conditions a large wind turbine experiences, experimentally, by compressing the air around a model-scale turbine up to 238 bar. This yields conditions similar to those experienced by a field-sized turbine using a model that is only 20 cm in diameter. High pressure enables tests at high Reynolds numbers but at low velocities, which implies that realistic non-dimensional frequencies can be tested even with such a small model. This unique feature is used both to study rotating wind turbines and their wakes, as well as the unsteady aerodynamics that are involved in these machines.

2023 Franklin Medal Symposium Honoring Nader Engheta: "Sculpting Waves with Complex Structures" (Villanova Livestream)
2023-04-26 09:00 - 13:00 | PA
*This is an event hosted by Villanova University. To gain access to the livestream, you must register to attend.*
Featuring presentations by a select group of world-class experts, this symposium celebrates the groundbreaking contributions of Dr. Nader Engheta in complex electromagnetic structures, plasmonics, optical nanocircuitry, and wave-based computing. The speakers discuss the current and future trends in the physics of light/matter interaction and present the latest innovations in electromagnetic and optical materials which promise to have broad applications in ultrafast computing, communication technologies, and high-resolution imaging.
Learn more about this event (agenda, speakers, etc.).
Register with Villanova University to access the livestream.

ASSET Seminar: AI and Medicine: One Possible Future for Augmented Care, Kevin B Johnson (University of Pennsylvania)
2023-04-26 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Scientific discoveries, fueled by data collected during the course of care, are promising to radically change how we think about health, disease, prevention and treatment. However, the very systems that are responsible for this tsunami of data are crippling many aspects of the care delivery system. In particular, the burden of documentation, the challenges of information retrieval, and the regulatory pressure on the healthcare system are responsible for burnout and even attrition among healthcare professionals. This talk will briefly summarize the history of the present-day EHR, describe some recent and promising advances using AI, and propose some approaches to re-engineering our system of digitally-enhanced care to augment the cognitive capabilities of today’s healthcare providers.

CBE Seminar Series: "Multiscale Bioinspired Material Intelligence" (Markus J. Buehler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2023-04-26 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Digital biomaterials are designed through an integrated approach of large-scale computational modeling, material informatics, and artificial intelligence/machine learning to optimize and leverage novel smart material manufacturing for advanced mechanical properties. Through the use of nanotechnology and additive manufacturing, and bio-inspired methods, we can now mimic and improve upon natural processes by which materials evolve, are manufactured, and how they meet changing functional needs. In this talk we show how we use mechanics to fabricate innovative materials from the molecular scale upwards, with built-in bio-inspired intelligence and novel properties, while sourced from sustainable resources, and breaking the barrier between living and non-living systems. Applied specifically to protein materials, this integrated materiomic approach is revolutionizing the way we design and use materials, and has the potential to impact many industries, as we harness data-driven modeling and manufacturing across domains and applications. The talk will cover several case studies covering distinct scales, from spider webs and silk, to collagen, to biomineralized materials, as well as applications to food and agriculture, and focuses on mechanistic insights using scaling laws and size effect studies.
Bio:
Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT (an Institute-wide Endowed Chair), a member of the Center for Materials Science and Engineering, and the Center for Computational Science and Engineering at the Schwarzman College of Computing. He holds academic appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering. In his research, Professor Buehler pursues new modeling, design and manufacturing approaches for advanced biomaterials that offer greater resilience and a wide range of controllable properties from the nano- to the macroscale. His interests include a variety of functional material properties including mechanical, optical and biological, linking chemical features, hierarchical and multiscale structures, to performance in the context of physiological, pathological and other extreme conditions. His methods include molecular and multiscale modeling, design, as well as experimental synthesis and characterization. His particular interest lies in the mechanics of complex hierarchical materials with features across scales (e.g. nanotubes, graphene and natural biomaterial nanostructures including protein materials such as intermediate filaments and hair, collagen, silk and elastin, and other structural biomaterials). An expert in computational materials science and AI, he has pioneered the field of materiomics, and demonstrated broad impacts in the study of mechanical properties of complex materials, including predictive materials design and manufacturing. Between 2013-2020, Buehler served as Department Head of MIT’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. He has held numerous other leadership roles at professional organizations, including a term as President of the Society of Engineering Science (SES).

Abstraction in Language and Systems: A Symposium in Honor of Barbara Liskov
2023-04-27 09:30 - 12:30 | Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall, 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACTION IN LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS

Laureate symposium honoring Barbara Liskov, recipient of the 2023 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science

Featuring:
Barbara Liskov, Ph.D., Laureate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lorenzo Alvisi, Ph.D.
Cornell University
Maurice Herlihy, Ph.D.
Brown University
Andrew Myers, Ph.D.
Cornell University

Location:
University of Pennsylvania
Berger Auditorium
Skirkanich Hall
210 S 33rd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
www.upenn.edu

LEARN MORE

Contact: Prof. Mitch Marcus, University of Pennsylvania

Sponsored by:
The Franklin Institute and the University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science and School of Engineering and Applied Science

ASSET Seminar: Neurosymbolic Programming for Science, Swarat Chaudhuri (University of Texas at Austin)
2023-05-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
PRESENTATION ABSTRACT:
Neurosymbolic programming (NSP) is an emerging area of computing that bridges the fields of deep learning and program synthesis. Like in classical machine learning, the goal here is to learn functions from data. However, these functions are represented as programs that use neural network modules as well as symbolic primitives and are induced using a mix of symbolic search and gradient-based optimization.
In this talk, I will give an elementary introduction to NSP and show how methods in this area have natural applications in accelerating scientific discovery. Specifically, using applications in behavioral neuroscience, I will show that NSP offers natural ways of incorporating prior knowledge into data-driven scientific discovery and interpreting discovered knowledge. I will conclude with a discussion of some of the open technical challenges in NSP in general and NSP-for-science in particular.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Next-generation Analyses of T Cell Receptor Repertoires" (Michael Malone)
2023-05-04 10:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Jenny Jiang are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Michael Malone.

Title: Next-generation Analyses of T Cell Receptor Repertoires
Date: May 4, 2023
Time: 10am – 12pm
Location: Raisler Lounge, 225 Towne Building

The public is welcome to attend.

Zoom info:

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BE Seminar: "Bioengineered Platforms for Mechanistic Understandings and Therapeutic Interventions" (Shyni Varghese, Duke University)
2023-05-04 15:30 - 16:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This talk will be held in person in Glandt Forum; snacks will be served.
Regenerative medicine is an interdisciplinary field that has significant promise for treating compromised tissues and organs. In our laboratory, we use a number of tools including biomaterials, organoids, quantitative modeling, and animal models to gain new fundamental understandings and identify therapeutic targets. In this talk, I will show several examples from our lab illustrating the use of such platforms to address key problems in tissue repair with aging and disease progression. First, I will discuss our efforts in creating synthetic analogs of the extracellular matrix to direct stem cell commitment in vitro and in vivo with a focus on bone tissue repair and employing such platforms to understand molecular mechanisms underlying bone homeostasis and identifying new therapeutic targets (Shih et al., PNAS 111: 990, 2014; 114: 5419 2017; Kang H et al., Biomacromolecules 16: 1050, 2015; Shih et al., Sci. Adv. 5: eaax1387, 2019). Next, I will discuss how these understandings can be leveraged to develop therapeutic interventions to promote tissue repair and mitigate pain (Zeng et al., Adv. Mater. 32, 2020). Finally, I will end the talk by discussing our ongoing efforts in studying the effect of aging on neuroinflammation.

[VIRTUAL] Spring 2023 Robotics MSE Capstone Presentation
2023-05-04 16:00 - 16:30 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
This is a virtual event via Zoom.
Zachary Block, Amar Mohanty, Keyan Zhai
Advised by Dr. Mark Yim
“Automated At-Home Fall Assessment for the Elderly Using Computer Vision”
