• ESE Fall Seminar – “Diamond and GaN: Wide-Bandgap Allies for Thermal and Power Management from Devices to 3D-Stacked Chips”

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

    Once considered exotic, diamond and gallium nitride (GaN) have become practical enablers for next-generation electronic systems. Their convergence—diamond providing exceptional thermal conductivity and GaN delivering high-efficiency power conversion—lays the groundwork for integrated thermal–power co-design. As computing, RF, and high-performance systems push toward higher power densities, conventional packaging and cooling approaches struggle to manage buried hotspots […]

    Penn AI Seminar Featuring Li Shen: Harnessing Trustworthy AI and Informatics for Dementia and Aging Research

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

    Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) remains a major health crisis with profound social and economic burdens. Innovative strategies are needed to identify genetic risk and protective factors, model disease mechanisms, and accelerate therapeutic discovery. Advances in trustworthy AI and informatics now enable the integration of multimodal genetics, omics, imaging, and outcome data from large […]

    CIS Seminar: “Good Old Fashioned Engineering Can Close the 100,000 Year “Data Gap” in Robotics”

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    AI is rapidly advancing the way we think, but we live in a material world. We still need to move things, make things, and maintain things. We need AI-driven robots to support an aging human population that doesn’t have enough workers.  Large vision-language models based on internet-scale data can now pass the Turing Test for […]

    ASSET Seminar: “The coverage principle in language models: From pre-training to test-time scaling”

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

    Test-time compute has emerged as a new axis for scaling language model capabilities, yet we lack a principled understanding of this paradigm. What are the right algorithms and trade-offs for test-time scaling? What properties of the pre-trained model enable it? And can we better align pre-training recipes for test-time success? This talk addresses these questions […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Huy Ha, Columbia University & Stanford University, “UMI on Legs: Making Manipulation Policies Mobile with Manipulation-Centric Whole-body Controllers”

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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 We introduce UMI-on-Legs, a new framework that combines real-world and simulation data for quadruped manipulation systems. We scale task-centric data collection in the real world using a hand-held gripper (UMI), providing a cheap way to demonstrate task-relevant manipulation […]

    MSE David P. Pope Distinguished Lecture: Ion Migration and Its Impact on the Stability of Halide Perovskite Solar Cells – Prashant Kamat – University of Notre Dame

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

    The ability to tune the bandgap of metal halide perovskites by alloying different halide ions is key to advancing tandem solar cells and light-emitting displays. However, this compositional flexibility also introduces challenges, most notably, the photoinduced migration of halide ions, which can degrade device performance. A prominent manifestation is photoinduced phase segregation in mixed-halide perovskites […]

    FOLDS Seminar: ACS: An interactive framework for machine-assisted selection with model-free guarantees

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

    Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722   In this talk, I will introduce adaptive conformal selection (ACS), an interactive framework for model-free selection with guaranteed error control. Building on conformal selection (Jin and Candès, 2023b), ACS generalizes the approach to support human-in-the-loop adaptive data analysis. Under the ACS framework, we can partially reuse the data to boost the selection […]

    CIS Seminar: “Exams with More Learning and Less Stress with a Computer-Based Testing Facility”

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    Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    In this talk, I'll share (1) research on the benefits of frequent testing and "second-chance testing" (optional exam re-takes) on increased student learning and decreased test anxiety, (2) research on patterns of cheating on unproctored online assessments, and (3) how we've reduced the instructor workload at Illinois to implement frequent testing through our Computer-Based Testing […]

    CIS Seminar: “Exams with More Learning and Less Stress with a Computer-Based Testing Facility”

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    Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Exams are an important tool for summative assessment, whose utility has only grown with the advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, because they can be implemented in a trustworthy manner.  But exams are generally not well liked by either students or faculty.  Students find them stressful. For faculty (and their course staff), they […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Neville Hogan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Sensory-motor control in humans and robots”

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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 Despite recent advances, humans are still more agile and dexterous than robots; yet human communication (nerves) and actuation (muscles) are slower and our musculo-skeletal system is more complex. This presentation will consider features of neuro-mechanics that may confer advantage. However, they also impose limitations. […]

    Homecoming 2025: Penn Engineering Faculty Lightning Talks

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Auditorium 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Step back into the classroom with Penn Engineering! Join us for a series of TED Talk-style Lightning Talks featuring some of our most popular professors as they share their latest groundbreaking research. "Fragility and Resilience of the Soft Earth" Doug Jerolmack Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of Earth and Environmental Science […]