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 […]
Inverse problems seek to recover an unknown source signal X for which we have indirect, partial, or noisy measurements Y. Most real-world inverse problems are ill-posed and the conventional line of attack has been to assume some structure (or prior) on X. Unfortunately, priors are not always available and often challenging to model mathematically. Generative […]
This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Prevailing models in robotics reason about the world either as images (end-to-end learning approaches) or as a collection of rigid objects (classical approaches), but neither have proven to be suitable abstractions for manipulating cloth, ropes, piles of objects, plants, and natural terrain. My […]
This is an in-person event ONLY in AGH 306. ABSTRACT The future of AI is embodied — imagine intelligent agents that can navigate and manipulate the world, from robot assistants helping around the home to autonomous vehicles taking you anywhere safely. To act in the physical world, these agents must do more than process raw […]
Many autonomous systems (e.g, driverless cars and drones) must make decisions based on predictions of the future actions of other nearby agents, whose dynamics and intentions are unknown. E.g., autonomous cars must predict the motions of surrounding vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles. Autonomous racing drones must avoid crashing into other drones on the race course. Unfortunately, […]