• MEAM Seminar: “From Mollusk Shells to Dense Architectured Materials to Granular Crystals: How Building Blocks and Weak Interfaces Create High Mechanical Performance”

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    Zoom - Email MEAM for Link peterlit@seas.upenn.edu

    Regular building blocks of controlled shape and size can be assembled to create fully dense “architectured” materials and structures. When the building blocks are very stiff and when they interact through much softer materials or even only by frictional contact, the blocks can slide, rotate, separate or interlock collectively, providing a wealth of tunable mechanisms, […]

    ESE Spring Seminar – “Emergent Active Photonic Platforms for Next-Generation Mid-Infrared and Ultrafast Photonics”

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

    As two basic properties of light, wavelength and timescale are central to numerous photonic applications. Compared to visible and near-infrared, the longer wavelength mid-infrared spectral regime contains unique thermal visual information and chemical fingerprints of the environment.  On a different front, femtosecond light sources and systems can enable ultrafast information processing, sensing, and computing. Yet, […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Deep Learning and Uncertainty Quantification: Methodologies and Applications”

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    Zoom - Email MEAM for Link peterlit@seas.upenn.edu

    Uncertainty quantification is a recent emerging interdisciplinary area that leverages the power of statistical methods, machine learning models, numerical methods and data-driven approach to provide reliable inference for quantities of interest in natural science and engineering problems. In practice, the sources of uncertainty come from different aspects such as: aleatoric uncertainty where the uncertainty comes […]

    Spring 2022 GRASP SFI: Jason Ma, University of Pennsylvania, “Beyond Expected Reward in Offline Reinforcement Learning”

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    Levine 512

    *This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 512 and Virtual attendance via Zoom Offline reinforcement learning (RL), which uses pre-collected, reusable offline data without further environment interactions, permits sample-efficient, scalable and practical decision-making; however, most of the existing literature (1) focuses on improving algorithms for maximizing the expected cumulative reward, and (2) […]

    CBE Seminar: “Processive-Cleavage and Functionalization-Cleavage for Deconstruction of Polyolefins”

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

    Abstract The massive quantities of single-use plastics discarded each year requires new sustainable end-of-life solutions. Current technologies, such as melt-processing for recycling or incineration for partial energy recovery, are insufficient to deal with the crisis in its entirety. New methods involving chemical upcycling, by catalytic conversion of the used materials into higher value products, could […]

    MSE Seminar: “Hierarchically Ordered Block Copolymer Materials via Nonequilibrium Processing”

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

    The diversity and vastness in the types of properties of living systems, including enhanced mechanical properties of skin and bone, or responsive optical properties derived from structural coloration, are a result of the multiscale, hierarchical structure of the materials. The field of materials chemistry has leveraged equilibrium concepts to create complex materials seen in nature, […]

    ESE Spring Seminar – “Minimally Invasive and Chronically Stable Brain-Machine Interface”

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    Zoom - Meeting ID 992 3585 3697

    Stable chronic mapping of brain activities at the action potential level with high temporal resolution is essential for both fundamental neuroscience research and biomedical applications, including cognitive studies, memory encoding and retrieval, and neural prostheses. Conventional neural probes can provide high spatiotemporal-resolution brain signal recordings independent of probing depth, although they generally trigger foreign body […]

    BE Seminar: “Analysis of High-content Genomic Screening Data with Large-scale Optical Pooled Screens” (Paul Blainey, MIT)

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    This seminar will be held in person in Towne 337 and on zoom (check email for link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu). Genetic screens are critical for the systematic identification of genes underlying cellular phenotypes. While pooling gene perturbations greatly increases screening throughput, this approach was not yet compatible with the high-content imaging of complex and dynamic […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “User-friendly, Low-cost, Microfluidic Devices with Capillary Circuits for Multiplexed, Isothermal, Point-of-care Nucleic Acid Amplification Tests”

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    Zoom - Email MEAM for Link peterlit@seas.upenn.edu

    Rapid, sensitive, and specific detection of causative pathogens is key to personalized medicine and the prompt implementation of appropriate mitigation measures to reduce disease transmission, mortality, morbidity, and cost. Conventional molecular detection methods require trained personnel, sophisticated equipment, and specialized laboratories, which limits their use to centralized laboratories. To enable molecular diagnostics at the point […]

    GRASP on Robotics: Jing Xiao, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “Perception-Action Synergy in Uncertain Environments”

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

    Many robotic applications require a robot to operate in an environment with unknowns or uncertainty, at least initially, before it gathers enough information about the environment. In such a case, a robot must rely on sensing and perception to feel its way around. Moreover, it has to couple sensing/perception and motion synergistically in real time, […]

    ESE Spring Seminar – “End-to-end Learning for Robust Decision Making”

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    Heilmeier Hall (Room 100), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Because the physical world is complex, ambiguous, and unpredictable, autonomous agents must be engineered to exhibit a human-level degree of flexibility and generality — far beyond what we are capable of explicitly programming. Achieving such rich and intricate decision making requires rethinking the foundations of intelligence across all stages of the autonomous learning lifecycle. In […]

    PICS Colloquium “The Dynamics of Gas-Particle Partitioning: Insights from Laboratory, Field, and Modeling studies”

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    Zoom - email kathom@seas.upenn.edu

    Abstract: Ultrafine aerosols can significantly influence Earth’s climate if they are able to grow to sizes large enough to interact with the incoming solar radiation and nucleate cloud droplets. In clear air, aerosol growth occurs via gas-to-particle conversion of condensable trace gases, including sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, ammonia, and myriad oxidation products of […]