• ASSET Seminar: “Towards Sustainable Artificial Intelligence and Datacenters”

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

    Abstract: 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 […]

    Fall 2024 GRASP SFI: Carl Vondrick, Columbia University, “Making Sense of the Multimodal World”

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

    This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT People experience the world through modalities of sight, sound, words, touch, and more. By leveraging their natural relationships and developing multimodal learning methods, my research creates artificial perception systems with diverse skills, including spatial, physical, logical, and […]

    CBE Seminar: “Backbone Modifications in Peptide Natural Products” (James Link, Princeton University)

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

    Abstract: The posttranslational modifications (PTMs) in RiPPs (ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides) dictate their 3D structure and their bioactivity. An underlying structural feature of many RiPPs is macrocyclization, installed by a growing number of different enzymatic strategies. Another common class of PTM in RiPPs is backbone modification, such as the formation of thiazol(in)es and […]

    MSE Seminar: “Kagome Metals and Their Unusual Electronic Properties”

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

    In this talk, I will discuss new inroads in the study of electronic order within classes of metals built from kagome lattices or networks of corner sharing triangles.  The electronic band structures of these compounds are known to host a series of features such as Dirac crossings, saddle points, and flat bands at select carrier […]

    ESE PhD Seminar: “Learning Local Control Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Hybrid Systems”

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

    Safety-critical control is one of the fundamental problems in autonomous systems. A special class of autonomous systems is the class of hybrid dynamical systems, which involves both continuous dynamic flow and discrete dynamical mode jumps for state evolution. I will introduce how to synthesize safe controllers for hybrid dynamical systems based on local control barrier […]

    CIS Grace Hopper Distinguished Lecture: “OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Modeling”

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

    Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both AI research and commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the significance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including […]

    Fall 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Carnegie Mellon University, “Multimodal AI Agents”

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

    This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT In recent years, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) with advanced general capabilities has paved the way towards building language-guided agents that can perform complex, multi-step tasks on behalf of users, much like human assistants. […]

    PICS Colloquium with Daniel Tartakovsky: Information Theory of Multiscale Simulations

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    PICS Conference Room 534 - A Wing , 5th Floor 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    We present an information-theoretic approach for integration of multi-resolution data into multiscale simulations.  Fine-scale information can comprise observational data and/or simulation results related to both system states and system parameters. It is aggregated into its coarse-scale representation by setting a probabilistic equivalence between the two scales, with parameters that are determined via minimization of observables […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Engineering Innovation in Maternal and Fetal Health: The Biomechanics of High-Risk Pregnancies”

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    The reproductive soft tissues that support the fetus undergo some of the most dramatic and unique growth and remodeling events in the human body. The uterus and fetal membrane must grow and stretch during pregnancy to accommodate the fetus. Simultaneously, the cervix must remodel and be a mechanical barrier to keep the fetus within the […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “Power Electronics is Cool. Trends and Opportunities for the Coming Decades”

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

    For the past two decades, power management and delivery has been a bottleneck, limiting the size and performance of a range of applications from performance computing to mobile phones and wearables. In the coming decades, power electronics will become the ‘glue’ of the modern energy system network. With electronics embedded deeply into this network, well […]

    CIS Seminar: “Scaling Machine-Checkable Systems Verification in Coq”

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

    System software like operating systems and hypervisors forms the critical backbone of our computing infrastructure. However, due to their size and complexity, these systems often contain vulnerabilities that can compromise security. Formal verification offers a solution by mathematically proving software correctness, but its adoption is hindered by the substantial effort required to create these proofs. […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Advancing Diffusion Models for Text Generation”

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

    Abstract: Transformer-based language models have undoubtedly become the dominant and favorite architecture for language generation of our time. However, although they provide impressive text quality, they tend to be hard to control. In the domain of image synthesis, on the other hand, Denoising Diffusion Models (DDM) are the dominant approach, shining with unprecedented quality and […]