BE Seminar: "Systems Immunology Approaches for Tissue Repair and Regeneration" (Andres Munoz-Rojas, Harvard)
2024-02-29 15:30 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The immune system uses a complex network of interacting cells that work together to regulate tissue physiology, homeostasis, and repair. In muscle, a tightly coordinated network of immunocytes and mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) is required for adequate skeletal muscle repair after acute injury or disease. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) are important players in regulating excessive inflammation and potentiating regeneration, but the extent of intercellular communications underlying their functions remains poorly understood. In this seminar, I will discuss my efforts in developing systems immunology approaches to dissect the dynamic communication networks between muscle Tregs and MSCs in a time-resolved study of skeletal muscle injury. Bringing together tools from single-cell and computational biology, engineering, and immunology, we uncovered distinct communication pathways important for the recruitment and induction of regenerative Tregs and the potentiation of muscle repair. This work identifies novel regulatory pathways that can inform therapeutic approaches for muscle-related pathologies.

CIS Seminar: " Secure systems from insecure components"
2024-02-29 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
In many computer systems today, an attacker that breaks one system component can steal data from millions of users. In this talk, I will present three systems that can withstand component compromise. I will describe (1) a single sign-on system that protects user security and privacy from a compromised single sign-on server, (2) a secure-hardware-based backup service that protects user backups from compromised secure hardware devices, and (3) a web search engine that protects user queries from a compromised search engine. These systems provide strong security and privacy properties while taking into account practical constraints such as compatibility requirements, hardware limitations, and user expectations. Each splits user secrets across different system components, using new cryptographic tools to provide necessary functionality while protecting user data.

Spring 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Leonidas Guibas, Stanford University, “Compositional Modeling of 3D Objects and Scenes”
2024-03-01 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 on Zoom. This seminar will NOT be recorded.
ABSTRACT
Modeling 3D objects and scenes creates many challenges, both on the analysis and the synthesis sides. The focus of this talk is the compositional structure of objects (into parts) and of scenes (into objects) — and how such structure informs the modeling of 3D geometry, affordances, and functionality. We discuss a number of neural representations for 3D objects and scenes that are, or can be made to be, structure aware, enabling more efficient reconstruction as well as the creation of variations, both discrete and continuous. The talk will cover recent historical developments of modeling ideas through works that address how to leverage 2D and 3D sensor data (static or dynamic), direct human annotations on 2D images or 3D models, free-form language utterances, and finally physical simulation, all towards learning and exploiting this compositional structure for applications ranging from 3D content creation to robotic manipulation.

Research Impact Seminar - Bring Your Research Out of the Lab (Penn Engineering Entrepreneurship)
2024-03-01 16:00 - 17:30 | Towne 327
Learn how to commercialize your research and navigate Penn’s innovation ecosystem with Penn Engineering: Entrepreneurship. This is the first part of a series from Penn Engineering’s Entrepreneurship group.
Featuring:
Andrew Tsourkas, Professor of Bioengineering, Co-Founder, AlphaThera, Inc, Co-Founder, StreamLaunch, Llc
and
Jeffrey Babin, Professor of Practice and Associate Director of Entrepreneurship at Penn Engineering & Engineering Faculty Director for Venture Lab.
Refreshments will be provided.
Who: Faculty, Post-Docs, and PhD students
Where: Towne 327
When: 4-5:30 pm, Friday March 1, 2024
Add to calendar: Apple | Google | Office 365 | Outlook | Outlook.com | Yahoo
RSVP here (not required)
This session provides an introduction to the innovation and entrepreneurship process. In addition to reviewing key considerations for exploring opportunities for research beyond publication, we will discuss alternative approaches to increasing the impact and value of research. Faculty and practitioners will review commercialization, licensing, and venture creation based on technological innovation.

MEAM Seminar: "Dexterous Decision-Making for Real-World Robotic Manipulation"
2024-03-05 10:00 - 11:30 | Towne 337
For a robot to prepare a meal or clean a room, it must make a large array of decisions, such as what objects to clean first, where to grasp each ingredient and tool, how to open a heavy, overstuffed cabinet, and so on. To enable robots to tackle these tasks, I decompose the problem into two interdependent layers: generating a series of subgoals (i.e., a strategy) and solving for the robot behavior that achieves each of these subgoals. Critically, to accomplish a rich set of manipulation tasks, these subgoal solvers must account for force, motion, deformation, contact, uncertainty and partial observability.
My research contributes models and algorithms that enable robots to reason over both the geometry and physics of the world in order to solve long-horizon manipulation tasks. In this talk, I will first discuss how this approach has enabled robots to perform tasks that require reasoning over and exerting force, like opening a childproof medicine bottle with a single arm. Next, I will present an abstraction for the complex physics of frictional pushing and demonstrate its application within the context of in-hand manipulation. Finally, I will illustrate how robots can make robust choices in the face of uncertainty. For example, this empowers robots to reliably chop up fruit of unknown ripeness!

MEAM Seminar: "Active Materials and Devices for Biomedical Applications"
2024-03-07 10:00 - 11:30 | Room 337, Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
In this talk, I will discuss our recent work in materials fabrication, manipulation, assembly, and manufacturing tailored towards biomedical and environmental applications. The focus is on active materials and devices enabled by materials control across a wide range of length scales. At the nanoscale, I will discuss 3D electrokinetic tweezers, an ultra-precision tool developed in my lab, which can be used to manipulate nanowires in room-temperature aqueous solutions. With this technique, designed nanostructures are maneuvered as untethered robotic tools for probing single biological cells; the precision reaches 20 nm in position and 0.5° in orientation in water solution with a standard microscope. At a slightly larger, chip-scale, I will describe a recent innovation that permits the light-controlled patterning of soft actuators made of microbubbles, which assemble large arrays of nanoparticles in parallel. The co-assembly of nanosensor-cell hybrids can be further achieved that detect metabolites of bacterial cells. Finally, I will present a rational scheme for developing large-scale, hierarchically porous superstructures for applications in monitoring human health and public-health relevant water treatment.

BE Seminar: "Charting the future of RNA and protein sequence-structure exploration" (Kalli Kappel, MIT/Harvard)
2024-03-07 15:30 - 16:30 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
RNA and protein sequences dictate their structures, spanning multiple length scales, from molecular conformations to patterns of subcellular localization. In turn, these structures govern biological function. Characterizing sequence-structure relationships is critical for gaining mechanistic understanding, but conventional techniques can be slow and low-throughput. We have developed integrated computational and experimental methods to overcome these limitations and have applied them to resolve the three-dimensional structures of a wide range of RNA molecules and RNA-protein complexes, and to systematically reveal the protein sequence features that drive condensate formation in cells. This work paves the way for the development of transformative predictive models of RNA and protein sequence-structure relationships.

Spring 2024 GRASP Seminar: Yutong Bai, Johns Hopkins University, "Listening to the Data: Visual Learning from the Bottom Up"
2024-03-08 14:00 - 15:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This seminar will be held in-person in Levine 307 with virtual attendance via Zoom.
ABSTRACT
We introduce a novel sequential modeling approach which enables learning a Large Vision Model (LVM) without making use of any linguistic data. To do this, we define a common format, “visual sentences”, in which we can represent raw images and videos as well as annotated data sources such as semantic segmentations and depth reconstructions without needing any meta-knowledge beyond the pixels. Once this wide variety of visual data (comprising 420 billion tokens) is represented as sequences, the model can be trained to minimize a cross-entropy loss for next token prediction. By training across various scales of model architecture and data diversity, we provide empirical evidence that our models scale effectively. Many different vision tasks can be solved by designing suitable visual prompts at test time.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Engineering hydrogel microstructure to promote meniscus repair" (Karen Xu)
2024-03-11 12:00 - 14:00 | JMB Reunion Auditorium, 3620 Hamilton Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania along with Drs. Jason Burdick and Rob Mauck proudly announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Karen Xu.
Title: Engineering hydrogel microstructure to promote meniscus repair
Date: March 11, 2024
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Reunion Auditorium in John Morgan Building
If you would like a zoom link, please email: karen.xu@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
The public is welcome to attend.

Spring 2024 GRASP Seminar: Saurabh Gupta, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "Robot Learning by Understanding Egocentric Videos"
2024-03-11 14:30 - 15:30 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This seminar will be held in-person in Raisler Lounge (Towne 225) with virtual attendance via Zoom.
ABSTRACT
True gains of machine learning in AI sub-fields such as computer vision and natural language processing have come about from the use of large-scale diverse datasets for learning. In this talk, I will discuss how we can leverage large-scale diverse data in the form of egocentric videos (first-person videos of humans conducting different tasks) to similarly scale up policy learning for robots. A central challenge is the gap in embodiment and intentions. I will describe how we can leverage video data in spite of this gap by learning at different levels of abstraction. I will demonstrate applications of this principle for a) acquiring low-level visuomotor subroutines and high-level value functions for navigation, and b) building an interactive understanding of objects, through observation of human hands, for manipulation.

MEAM Seminar: "Lymphocyte Mechano-regulation for Immunotherapies"
2024-03-12 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
In the dynamic field of biomedical engineering and immunotherapy, my recent research unveils the intricate relationship between mechanical forces and immune cell activation, bridging the realms of biology and immunotherapy. This study aims to unearth innovative pathways for adoptive immunotherapies, emphasizing the role of biomedical and mechanobiological insights in broadening our understanding.
The core focus lies in decoding the mechanobiological pathways governing T cell and B cell activation. It explores the interplay between external mechanical cues and the immune cell activation process, with a nod to biomedical concepts for fresh perspectives. In my presentation I will focus on links between mechanical cues, gene expression profiles, and the spatial organization of genomic loci and transcripts within immune cells. Combining optical super-resolution imaging, traction force and molecular force microscopy with functional read-outs – such as single cell transcriptomics and mitochondrial activity – opens possibilities for quality control in chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy, with potential applications in clinical contexts.
This interdisciplinary approach holds the potential to revolutionize adoptive immunotherapies, incorporating insights from biomedical and life sciences.

ESE Spring Seminar - "Learning and controlling noisy quantum systems"
2024-03-12 11:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Two of the main challenges in scaling up quantum systems are noise and control, arising from the systems’ sensitivity to the environment and its exponential complexity. The first step in resolving these challenges is characterizing and learning the noisy dynamics. In this talk, I’ll discuss how the very quantum features that contribute to this complexity, such as entanglement, can actually enhance our ability to learn quantum processes. I’ll then show how, by using information about noise and its interactions with controls, we can efficiently suppress noise processes on a large scale when executing quantum programs. Additionally, I’ll highlight the advantages of newly developed adaptive control techniques with dynamic circuits for performing long-range entangling operations faster and with greater fidelity than non-adaptive circuits. Finally, I’ll discuss future directions and open questions in understanding noisy quantum systems.

CIS Seminar: "Modern Clouds: Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses"
2024-03-12 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Cloud computing, which has seen significant growth over the past decade, fundamentally relies on the sharing of hardware resources among users. This approach enhances resource utilization and reduces operational costs. However, it also enables unintended information leakage through hardware side channels. Despite the threat of side-channel attacks, cloud vendors remain skeptical about the practicality of these attacks in production cloud environments, leading to inadequate side-channel mitigations.

My PhD research focuses on exploring side-channel attacks in realistic cloud settings and developing comprehensive defenses across the computing stack. In this talk, I will first introduce a series of novel attack techniques that address practical challenges in conducting side-channel attacks in clouds. Using these techniques, I demonstrated an end-to-end, cross-tenant side-channel attack on Google Cloud. This demonstration was subsequently recognized by Google as a critical-level bug, prompting a review by their product team. In the second part of this talk, I will introduce Untangle, a novel framework for side-channel defense. Untangle is designed to quantify and reduce information leakage in defense schemes based on dynamic resource-partitioning. Untangle opens up a new defense paradigm that allows a controlled amount of information leakage in exchange for improved performance. To conclude, I will outline future research directions aimed at developing secure and efficient cloud systems resistant to side-channel attacks.

ASSET Seminar: "Making Machine Learning Predictably Reliable" (Andrew Ilyas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2024-03-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT:
Despite ML models’ impressive performance, training and deploying them is currently a somewhat messy endeavor. But does it have to be? In this talk, I overview my work on making ML “predictably reliable”—enabling developers to know when their models will work, when they will fail, and why.
To begin, we use a case study of adversarial inputs to show that human intuition can be a poor predictor of how ML models operate. Motivated by this, we present a line of work that aims to develop a precise understanding of the ML pipeline, combining statistical tools with large-scale experiments to characterize the role of each individual design choice: from how to collect data, to what dataset to train on, to what learning algorithm to use.
ZOOM LINK (if unable to attend in-person): https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98699592762

Spring 2024 GRASP SFI: Joseph DelPreto, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Using Sensing and AI to Enrich Human Interactions with Machines and Nature"
2024-03-13 15:00 - 16:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom.
ABSTRACT
Coupling advanced wearable and environmental sensors with dynamic AI frameworks has the potential to transform how we engage with machines and with the natural world. By co-developing intelligent sensors and deployable machine learning pipelines, we can unlock the power of data to address impactful challenges in fields ranging from human-robot collaboration to environmental science. Realizing this vision will require a multifaceted approach including networks that extract insights from large streams of continuous data, algorithms that adapt to new subjects or environments from limited examples, unobtrusive sensing with embedded autonomy, scalable multimodal dataset curation, and paradigms for fluid human interactions with AI systems. Moving towards these goals, this talk will present approaches to creating more intelligent and fluid human-robot interactions by leveraging wearable sensors for brain, muscle, and motion activity combined with adaptive learning pipelines. It will explore how these techniques can scale to curate multimodal datasets of human behavior that aim to support foundational models of physical intelligence. To help improve sensing capabilities, it will also discuss techniques for creating soft wearable sensors with embedded learning pipelines. Finally, recent results of using wearable and deployable sensors to study non-human species will be introduced; combining robust wearable sensor tags, drones, and new machine learning pipelines can reveal exciting insights into the language and culture of sperm whales.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Ionizable Lipid Nanoparticles for Solid Tumor Chimeric Antigen Receptor Immunotherapy" (Alvin Mukalel)
2024-03-13 15:00 - 17:00 | Auditorium, LRSM Building, 3231 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Michael J. Mitchell are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Alvin Mukalel.

Title: Ionizable Lipid Nanoparticles for Solid Tumor Chimeric Antigen Receptor Immunotherapy
Date: March 13, 2024
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: LRSM Auditorium

The public is welcome to attend.

CBE Seminar: "Carbon Capture and Utilization in Flowing Oceanwater: A New Frontier in Photocatalysis" (Shu Hu, Yale)
2024-03-13 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) are critical for managing anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Great strides have been made in electrification so far, but there are a handful of scenarios that still require hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals, such as aviation, long-haul trucking, and marine shipping. On the one hand, atmospheric CO2 is only 420 ppm, and using alkaline sorbents for direct air capture is energy intensive; and there are issues with carbon utilization during electrochemical CO2 reduction. On the other hand, atmospheric CO2 exchanges with surface seawater constantly, and the concentration of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in the oceans is approximately 140 times higher in carbon molarity than atmospheric CO2. Thus, capturing and converting DIC in seawater represents an alternative approach to CO2 direct air capture. For these new opportunities, our group takes a multi-scale approach: i.e., combining light-driven photocatalysis with reactive transport using engineered photo-reactors, such as utilizing the 2.3-millimolar dissolved bicarbonate in oceanwater under sunlight. Photocatalysis concerns multiple redox reactions located within nanoscale distances: I will first elucidate the chemical physics of coupled processes during photocatalysis essentially to achieve >85% quantum efficiency; and then, I will describe the design and realization of 3D-printed reactors. A flow photoreactor enables realistic ocean operation. This new process achieves one-step conversion to syngas, which directly enables on-site liquid fuel production. Thus, it saves over 50% of the energy that is used for stepwise separation of the 420 ppm CO2 in the air.

Energy Week Lecture - "Towards Sustainable Artificial Intelligence and Datacenters"
2024-03-14 09:00 - 10:00 | Towne 337
As the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to proliferate, computer architects must assess and mitigate its environmental impact. This talk will survey strategies for reducing the carbon footprint of AI computation and datacenter infrastructure, drawing on data and experiences from industrial, hyperscale systems. First, we analyze the embodied and operational carbon implications of super-linear AI growth. Second, we re-think datacenter infrastructure and define a solution space for carbon-free computation with renewable energy, utility-scale batteries, and job scheduling. Finally, we develop strategies for datacenter demand response, incentivizing both batch and real-time workloads to modulate power usage in ways that reflect their performance costs. In summary, the talk provides a broad perspective on sustainable computing and outlines the many remaining directions for future work.

CIS Seminar: "Frameworks for Efficient Algorithms for Learning: Robustness and Data Compression"
2024-03-14 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Though modern machine learning has been highly successful, as we move towards more critical applications, many challenges towards building trustworthy systems, such as ensuring robustness, privacy, and fairness, arise. Ad hoc and empirical approaches have often led to unintended consequences for these objectives, thus necessitating a principled approach. Traditional solutions often require redesigning entire pipelines or come with a significant loss in quality. In this talk, we will look at principles towards incorporating important desiderata into existing pipelines without significant computational and statistical overhead.
We will see two vignettes of this line of research. First, we introduce the smoothed adversary model for sequential decision making, which serves as a general model for learning under distribution shifts. In this setting, we will statistically and computationally efficient algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. Second, we will see a nearly linear-time algorithm for distribution compression leading to improved computational efficiency in diverse downstream statistical tasks.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Engineering Small Protein Based Inhibitors and Biodegraders for Cytosolic Delivery and Targeting of the Undruggable Proteome" (Alex Chan)
2024-03-15 10:00 - 11:00 | Smilow Center for Translational Research in SCTR 11-146AB
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Andrew Tsourkas are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Alex Chan

Title: Engineering Small Protein Based Inhibitors and Biodegraders for Cytosolic Delivery and Targeting of the Undruggable Proteome

Date: Friday, March 15
Time: 10:00-11:00 AM
Location: Smilow Translational Research Center SCTR 11-146AB

Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/94191357504
Meeting ID: 941 9135 7504

The public is welcome to attend.

ESE Spring Seminar - "The Next Leap in Hardware Systems: Powered by Heterogenous Memory, Logic, and 3D Integration"
2024-03-18 13:30 - 14:30 | Towne 337
Computing is at a critical juncture. Applications such as AI/ML demand much larger memory, higher bandwidth, and lower-energy compute compared to business as usual. New hardware systems, powered by heterogenous memory, logic, and 3D integration, are required for large energy efficiency, throughput, and scaleup benefits. I will present my contributions to three such heterogeneous systems:

The first edge AI/ML chips with full on-chip inference and training of CNNs and Transformers using foundry Resistive RAM (RRAM). The heterogeneous combination of RRAM and SRAM enables new circuit-architecture-algorithm interplay, resulting in 9× or higher end-to-end Energy-Delay-Product (EDP) benefits versus traditional duty-cycled systems using SRAM, DRAM, or Flash.
New multi-chip Illusion systems for scaleup to 16× larger AI/ML models with 11× or higher EDP benefits versus traditional systems. Illusion minimizes inter-chip traffic by co-optimizing per-chip memory size, heterogeneous inter- and intra-chip interconnects, and idle power via fine-grained power management, thus creating the illusion (within 10% EDP) of a Dream Chip with all resources on-chip.
The first foundry heterogeneous monolithic 3D hardware integrating silicon CMOS, carbon nanotube field-effect transistors and RRAM, demonstrating 4× memory bandwidth versus iso-footprint, apples-to-apples conventional designs. Such benefits are only possible through new 3D architectures instead of 3D physical design alone.

Bigger benefits can be obtained for a wide set of applications by such hardware systems powered by a wider set of heterogeneous technologies. These also create exciting avenues for new courses.

MEAM Seminar: "Designing Heart Valves from First Principles: Model Generation, Congenital Disease and Surgical Treatment"
2024-03-19 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Congenital heart defects affect approximately one in every hundred births and are the leading cause of infant mortality in the United States. Despite successes in surgical treatment, suboptimal outcomes remain common. Surgical treatment of complex, rare congenital heart valve defects typically follows an empirical, retrospective, “guess and check” approach. Further, children with congenital valve defects are a heterogeneous patient population with limited numbers, so clinical trials are difficult to conduct. Thus, there is an unmet clinical need for engineering tools for design and analysis of congenital valve repair. Simulation-guided design tools provide a flexible, controllable and efficient means to predict optimal surgical repairs and fill this clinical need. This talk will present new methods for fluid-structure interaction simulations of heart valves and the application of these methods to congenital heart disease. I will present a novel, nearly first-principles method for model generation called design-based elasticity. In this method, a system of partial differential equations representing the mechanical equilibrium of the valve under pressure is derived. The solution of these equations, via tuning parameters and boundary conditions, is designed to represent the predicted loaded configuration of the valve. A full model is then constructed from the loaded configuration. When simulating their coupled dynamics with blood, these models are highly effective, producing realistic flows under physiological pressures over multiple cardiac cycles. Results compare favorably with experimental data and show that hemodynamics change drastically with congenitally diseased valve phenotypes. Finally, I will discuss simulation-guided design of surgical bicuspidization of the aortic valve, a repair technique for severe congenital aortic pathology, and preliminary results on in vitro validation and clinical translation to surgical practice.

ESE Spring Seminar - "An interdisciplinary approach to advance quantum science and technology"
2024-03-19 11:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Quantum science and technology hold the promise to deepen our understanding of the universe and deliver groundbreaking technical innovations. The opportunity also poses a grand challenge to today’s scientists and engineers because initializing, controlling, manipulating, and measuring quantum information while maintaining coherence and entanglement can be very difficult. Therefore, successfully achieving breakthroughs will require an interdisciplinary approach that leverages resources from various disciplines to forge new pathways that cannot be defined by a singular field of study.
In this colloquium, I will share my interdisciplinary adventure through quantum material and quantum device landscapes. We will start from the study of fundamental characteristics of Dirac and topological materials, discussing first how their remarkable properties manifest in Josephson junctions. We will then focus on how we utilize the material physics to invent single-photon detectors, which can operate as optical interconnects for cryogenic computing, probe the quantum state of the photon, and contribute to the search for dark matter axions. We will further explore how to utilize the novel properties of two-dimensional van der Waals materials to miniaturize qubits and develop quantum-noise-limited amplifiers. And finally, we will turn around to apply what we have learned from quantum sensing to study electron hydrodynamics and the pairing symmetry of novel superconductivities, including magic-angle-twisted graphene and topological Weyl superconductors. We will end by elucidating how to harness the kinetic inductance of these novel superconductors for future flight-missions to explore planetary science and the origins of life.
References:

E. D. Walsh, et. al., “Josephson junction infrared single-photon detector,” Science 372, 409 (2021).
A. Antony, et. al. “Miniaturizing transmon qubits using van der Waals materials,” Nano Lett. 21, 10122 (2021).
G.-H. Lee, et. al., “Graphene-based Josephson junction microwave bolometer,” Nature 586, 42 (2020).

CIS Seminar: Generalizing Outside the Training Distribution through Compositional Generation"
2024-03-19 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Generative AI has led to stunning successes in recent years but is fundamentally limited by the amount of data available. This is especially limiting in the embodied setting – where an agent must solve new tasks in new environments. In this talk, I’ll introduce the idea of compositional generative modeling, which enables generalization beyond the training data by building complex generative models from smaller constituents. I’ll first introduce the idea of energy-based models and illustrate how they enable compositional generative modeling. I’ll then illustrate how such compositional models enable us to synthesize complex plans for unseen tasks at inference time. Finally, I’ll show how such compositionality can be applied to multiple foundation models trained on various forms of Internet data, enabling us to construct decision-making systems that can hierarchically plan and solve long-horizon problems in a zero-shot manner.

Penn Bioengineering 50th Anniversary Lecture: "Synthetic Biology: Programmable Biology" (James J. Collins, MIT & Harvard)
2024-03-19 15:30 - 17:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Celebrate 50 years and beyond of Penn Bioengineering! This distinguished lecture will be held in honor of the Department of Bioengineering’s 50th Anniversary. Dr. Collins will deliver his talk in Glandt Forum at 3:30 pm, to be followed by a Q&A. A catered reception will follow in the Singh Center lobby at 4:30 pm.

ASSET Seminar: "Bridging the Gap Between Deep Learning Theory and Practice" (Micah Goldblum, New York University)
2024-03-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT:
Despite the widespread proliferation of neural networks, the mechanisms through which they operate so successfully are not well understood. In this talk, we will first explore empirical and theoretical investigations into neural network training and generalization and what they can tell us about why deep learning works. Then, we will examine a recent line of work on algorithm learning. While neural networks typically excel at pattern matching tasks, we consider whether neural networks can learn algorithms that scale to problem instances orders of magnitude larger than those seen during training.

ZOOM LINK (if unable to attend in-person): https://upenn.zoom.us/j/97343249657

Rigorous and Glamorous in 100 Words or Less: An Abstract Workshop
2024-03-20 12:00 - 13:30 | rsvp for zoom link
It’s hard to write an abstract. It’s harder to write a glamorous one that tells your story without overselling your results. Community for Rigor is here to help!
Join Professor Konrad Kording for a rigorous abstract writing workshop on March 20th, 2024. Together, let’s lovingly glam up abstracts from the Community and make the most of 100 words.
RSVP to join us Wednesday, March 20th, 2024, 12:00pm-1:30pm EST.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Ionizable lipid nanoparticles for in utero gene editing of congenital disease" (Rohan Palanki)
2024-03-20 13:00 - 15:00 | Smilow Center Auditorium, 3400 Civic Center Blvd, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Drs. Michael J. Mitchell and William H. Peranteau are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Rohan Palanki.
Title: Ionizable lipid nanoparticles for in utero gene editing of congenital disease
Date: March 20th, 2024
Time: (1PM-3 PM)
Location: Law Auditorium, Smilow Center for Translational Research (5th Floor)
The public is welcome to attend.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Nanofluidic Isolation and Quantification of Specific Extracellular Vesicles and Machine Learning Analysis to Aid Clinical Decision-Making" (Hanfei Shen)
2024-03-20 13:30 - 15:30 | Towne 337
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. David Issadore are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Hanfei Shen.

Title: Nanofluidic Isolation and Quantification of Specific Extracellular Vesicles and Machine Learning Analysis to Aid Clinical Decision-Making

Date: Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Time: 1:30pm-3:30pm
Location: Towne 337

The public is welcome to attend.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Tissue Engineered Cortical-Hippocampal Neural Networks for Pharmacological Investigations" (Victor Acero)
2024-03-20 14:00 - 16:00 | Class of 62 Auditorium, John Morgan Building, 3620 Hamilton Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. D. Kacy Cullen are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Victor Acero.
Title: Tissue Engineered Cortical-Hippocampal Neural Networks for Pharmacological Investigations
Date: March 20, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: John Morgan Building Class of 62 Auditorium

Zoom option: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/5112542338

The public is welcome to attend.
