The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. David Cormode are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Katherine Mossburg. Title: "Developing Silver Sulfide-Based Nanoparticles for Imaging and Treatment of Breast Cancer" Location: Alison Pouch (chair), Andrew Maidment, David Issadore Date: Friday, October 24, 2025 Time: 10:00 AM Location: Raisler Lounge, Towne […]
This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Vision Language Models (VLMs) are extremely successful, but their performance degrades when asked questions involving spatial relations and 3D world knowledge. Inspired by Cognitive Science, we develop 3D VLMs which are 3D-aware and 3D-explicit to help us to diagnose their failure nodes. We […]
To meet net-zero carbon emissions targets by mid-century, up to a ~30-fold increase in wind power capacity is required. Acceleration to this rate requires urgent improvements to efficiency and reliability of installed wind farms, as well as cost reductions for future offshore farms. To expand energy production, wind turbines are rapidly increasing in size, wind […]
One grand challenge for materials and structures design is to satisfy multiple conflicting requirements. For example, energy infrastructure, especially those in remote and extreme environments such as offshore wind turbines and nuclear reactors, requires components to operate effectively over long time periods and avoid catastrophic failures. Structural materials in aviation must be lightweight but high […]
We seek the ability to take a few images of a scene of interest, and turn it into an immersive visual experience, where one can explore it from different viewpoints, in effect visualizing a 3D representation of an object, scene or photograph, and providing numerous applications in augmented reality, e-commerce and 3D photography. This problem, […]
The two most popular vehicles for communicating uncertainty in the estimates of an unknown quantity are confidence sets and conformal sets. The set produced and its corresponding probability guarantee (conditional on the feature vector) depend upon assumptions the analyst has made about the underlying data generating process. For example, are the residuals independent and normally […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT Most tasks people wish robots could do (fetching objects across rooms, assisting in the kitchen, tidying) require mobile manipulation, the integration of navigation and manipulation. While robots have made remarkable progress in each skill independently, bringing them together […]
Abstract: Biomolecular condensates are membraneless compartments inside living cells that play critical roles in health and disease. Over the past two decades, a wide body of work has established that these compartments form through phase separation of molecules such as proteins and RNA. This discovery has sparked significant interest in uncovering the molecular factors that […]
After an introduction to quantum computing, we discuss the currently practiced framework of "hybrid" computing, which is a method of accelerating traditional High Performance Compute (HPC) with Quantum Processing Units. I will talk about some of the ways in which Dell's research office has implemented this idea and the value it can bring to modern […]
The next generation of intelligent and autonomous systems requires not only novel devices but also new silicon architectures and design workflows that transcend conventional approaches to deliver real-time learning, perception, and decision-making under severe power and resource constraints. In this talk, I will outline a cross-layer methodology for architecting silicon for embodied AI, from workload […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722 Weak-to-Strong Generalization (Burns et al., 2023) is the phenomenon whereby a strong student, say GPT-4, learns a task from a weak teacher, say GPT-2, and ends up significantly outperforming the teacher. We show that this phenomenon does not require a strong and complex learner like GPT-4, nor pre-training. We consider students and […]