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    • 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 […]

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

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

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

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

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    Towne 337

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

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

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

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

    FOLDS seminar: Function Space Perspectives on Neural Networks

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

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

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

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

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