Penn Engineering Events

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "Flying Modular Robots: From Self-Assembling Structures in Midair to Embedding Grasping Capabilities"
2021-11-16 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
Flying modular robots offer a suitable autonomous platform for multiple applications such as: search and rescue, cargo lifting, and object transportation. In addition, modular robots in a swarm can use their own bodies as building units to assemble large structures. This thesis introduces ModQuad, the self-assembly structure that can cooperatively fly based on autonomous modules. With these modules it is possible to assemble structures with rigid connections in multiple configurations. In contrast to related work, instead of assembling on the ground or on water, a midair approach to assemble structures is proposed. Docking modules in midair offer relevant advantages by the cost of the complexity to adapt the conglomerate controller at each docking step. Assembling structures in midair usually requires a relative localization system in between modules. A vision-based self-assembly method is proposed with structures composed of two modules. Scaling these flying modular robotic structures is a challenging problem usually limiting the benefits of modularity. A novel yaw actuation for quadrotor-based modules using individuals rolling angles by a one degree of freedom cage design is proposed for a more effective controllability around the structure z-axis. The resulting implementation enlarges the configuration space in a line configuration. Expanding the one degree of freedom cage design to arbitrary configurations allowed the development of algorithms capable of generating optimal and near-optimal configurations through a computational efficient search that first classifies and groups modules within the structure. Lastly, structures composed of non-rigid connections are explored leading the whole conglomerate to change its shape dynamically in-flight. Instead of adding extra components and mechanisms, versatility of modularity is utilized to embed grasping capabilities through a shape change addressed to a four-bar linkage configuration.

PSOC@Penn Seminar: "Cell Learning" (Jeremy Gunawardena)
2021-11-15 12:00 - 13:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Room: Towne 225/Raisler Lounge
For zoom link, contact manu@seas.upenn.edu.

PICS Colloquium: "Molecular organization in biology: What can computer simulations teach us?"
2021-11-12 14:00 - 15:00 | PICS Conference Room 534 – A Wing , 5th Floor, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract: The formation of membraneless organelles (MLOs) via phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids has emerged as an essential process with which cells can maintain spatiotemporal control. Despite enormous progress in understanding the role of MLOs in biological function in the last ten years or so, the molecular details of the underlying phenomena are only beginning to emerge recently. We use computer simulations of coarse-grained and all-atom models to complement experimental studies to achieve insights into the molecular driving forces underlying biomolecular phase separation. In this talk, I’ll highlight results that demonstrate our approach’s usefulness for identifying general principles and system-specific insights into biomolecular structure and function. These results also open up new avenues for the design of biomaterials with tunable properties.

GRASP on Robotics: “Approaches to Grounded Language Acquisition from Human Interaction”
2021-11-12 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance for Dr. Matuszek’s in-person talk in Wu & Chen Auditorium and Virtual attendance via Zoom Webinar here.
As robots move from labs and factories into human-centric spaces, it becomes progressively harder to predetermine the environments and interactions they will need to be able to handle. Letting robots learn from end users via natural language is an intuitive, versatile approach to handling novel situations robustly. Grounded language acquisition is concerned with learning to understand language in the context of the physical world. In this presentation, I will give an overview of our work on using joint statistical models to learn the grounded semantics of natural language describing an agent’s environment, and will describe work on applying those models in a sim-to-real language learning environment. I will also discuss the role of speech understanding in grounded language learning, including introducing a new dataset and results on learning directly from that speech.

Snack Break with ODEI and EngiQueers
2021-11-11 13:00 - 15:00 | Lobby and Mezzanine, Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Levine Lobby 11/11 from 1pm-3pm
ODEI and EngiQueers are collaborating to host a grab and go snack break, that showcases prominent LGBTQ+ individuals in STEM throughout history. Come grab a snack, and get a fact about a queer individual who played an integral role in the advancement of the STEM field and industry. While learning about queer folks who are making significant contributions to engineering, learn more about the LGBTQ+ resources that are available for Penn students. Representatives from ODEI, oSTEM, and EngiQueers would love to see you!

MSE Seminar: "Local to Meso-scale Order in Electronic Ceramics Characterized by Aberration -Corrected Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy"
2021-11-11 12:30 - 13:30 | Auditorium, LRSM Building, 3231 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The ability to design the composition and microstructure of electronic ceramics for emerging technological applications requires sophisticated characterization techniques that can provide quantitative information about local structure and chemistry. Such structure quantification is particularly important to the fundamental understanding of properties in many important non-linear dielectrics, where chemical heterogeneities associated with dopants or intrinsic lattice defects give rise to local inhomogeneities in charge, strain and polarization. Such local deviations from the global average structure and symmetry are linked to enhancements in macroscopic dielectric and electromechanical properties. This seminar discusses the use of aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to quantify short- and medium-range lattice disorder in electronic oxides, including ferroelectrics and relaxor ferroelectrics. The ability to quantify local structure on a sublattice basis and in real space provides unique insight into the structural complexities of these materials.

ESE Fall Colloquium Seminar - " Beyond Curve-Fitting: What’s next for deep learning in biomedical imaging?"
2021-11-11 11:00 - 12:00 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Over the last 5-10 years, deep learning has transformed biomedical imaging, from enhancing acquisition to maximizing downstream utility of scans. My research group has been at the forefront of this revolution, developing novel methods that have laid the foundation for next-generation tools. As I will describe in my talk, much of this progress relies on predictive models and thus can be viewed as “curve-fitting” with general-purpose models. I will then show a few examples of recent work from my group, where we move beyond the curve-fitting paradigm and custom build models in ways that allow us to gain novel insights, understand how the output was computed, or empower the end-user to choose the solution best suited for their needs. These examples will be from a range of applications, including MRI reconstruction, image registration, and neural encoding with fMRI data.

Fall 2021 GRASP SFI: "Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on Engineered-Systems Design"
2021-11-10 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 via Zoom here…
Our research employs artificial intelligence techniques that seek to automate the main time/cost drivers of engineered-systems design. The features of a system inform the form, function and behavior of the resulting concept that can be subsequently created using traditional manufacturing/additive manufacturing methods. While there exists a wide range of computer aided design tools that seek to generate 3D design concepts, they are primarily parametric in nature and rely extensively on domain expertise, which may not always be readily available. Grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have enabled our research team to explore the use of Deep Generative Design methods such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate 3D representations of design concepts. However, there is more to a design than simply its 3D form, as the design must perform a function and operate in an environment where its behavior may/may not perform as intended. Towards this end, our research group has proposed liking the AI-generation of a design, with the automatic evaluation of its function and behavior using physics-based simulation engines. The end result is a physics-informed design that has the potential to be realized through techniques such as additive manufacturing.

CIS 189 Guest Lecture: "Optimization in Practice"
2021-11-09 17:15 - 18:15 | Towne 307, 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Discrete optimization plays a critical role in solving various resource allocation problems within the industry.
In this talk, we study problems from the two extremes of the optimization landscape; operational decision-making in real-time and resource provisioning for future considerations. Motivated by real-world business requirements ranging from load balancing in heterogeneous environments to privacy concerns and various service-level agreements, we demonstrate how constraint reasoning delivers effective solutions in both cases.
While solving large-scale problems is of great practical importance, we emphasize the need for solutions that are not only efficient but also flexible, easy to update and maintain. We show how Constraint Programming neatly suits the needs of such dynamic environments with continually changing requirements.

Towne 307 + Zoom
(Meeting ID: 945 8230 3285
Passcode: [REDACTED]

ESE Fall Colloquium Seminar - "2D Materials, from Academia to Industry"
2021-11-09 11:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Semiconductor sales will reach over $500 billion worldwide in 2021, a gigantic industry that keeps on growing with increasing demand for faster, more powerful, and smaller chips. However, as we keep scaling, the silicon (Si) transistor will soon reach its physical limit, and there is a pressing need to find an alternative post-Si material to enable the continuation of Moore’s Law.
In the early 2000s, scientists discovered that graphite could be exfoliated down into an atomic form, going from a 3D bulk material down to a 2D stable honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms called graphene. Scientists marveled at graphene’s astonishing electrical and mechanical properties, however, for all that graphene has to offer, it lacks a band gap that is essential for logic devices. This created a surge in research on materials beyond graphene, scientists searching for an elusive 2D material that would possess a bandgap to satisfy the need of the semiconducting industry. Monolayer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDs) possess the bandgap that graphene lacks, and with the vast variety of TMDs available, coupled with its encouraging electrical properties, make TMDs a promising candidate.
In this talk, I will present my years of research on 2D materials focusing on TMDs, from synthesis and characterization to innovative applications. I will demonstrate a scalable method for monolayer TMD growth and integration, its applications (e.g. opioid biosensor and flexible electronics), the first report of monolayer growth and electrical characterization of the topological 1T’-TMDs, and in-plane monolayer TMD heterostructures with different metal atoms or atomic phases. I will also discuss some of Intel’s industrial research to date on 2D materials, how TMDs and other 2D materials are finding their way into production and potentially into everyone’s day to day life.

MEAM Seminar: "Time and Rate Dependent Fracture of Polymer Gels and Interfaces"
2021-11-09 10:00 - 11:30 | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
Fracture of materials and interfaces is often time and rate dependent. The underlying mechanisms for the time and rate dependent fracture may include local molecular processes, viscoelasticity, and poroelasticity (solvent diffusion coupled with deformation). In this talk, I will present our recent works on two different mechanisms. First, the effects of poroelasticity on fracture of polymer gels will be discussed. A path-independent, modified J-integral approach is adopted to define the crack-tip energy release rate as the energetic driving force for crack growth in gels, taking into account the energy dissipation by solvent diffusion. For a stationary crack, the energy release rate is time dependent, with which delayed fracture can be predicted based on a Griffith-like fracture criterion. For steady-state crack growth in a long-strip specimen, the energy release rate is a function of the crack speed, with rate-dependent poroelastic toughening. With a poroelastic cohesive zone model, solvent diffusion within the cohesive zone leads to significantly enhanced poroelastic toughening as the crack speed increases. Second, for rate-dependent fracture of a polymer interface, we propose a multiscale cohesive zone model, considering the energetics of bond stretching, the entropic effect of long molecular chains, the kinetics of thermally activated chain scission, and statistical distributions of the chain lengths. This model relates the macroscopically measurable interfacial properties (toughness, strength, and traction-separation relations) to molecular structures of the interface, and the rate dependence results naturally from the kinetics of damage evolution as a thermally activated process. Finite element simulations with the cohesive zone model are directly compared to double cantilever beam experiments for rate-dependent fracture of a silicon/epoxy interface.

BE Dissertation Defense: "Versican/Collagen Interactions in Tissue Structure and Mechanics" (Dongning Chen)
2021-11-08 12:00 - 14:00 | BRB 253
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Rebecca Wells are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Dongning Chen.

Title: Versican/Collagen Interactions in Tissue Structure and Mechanics
Date: Nov. 8, 2021
Time: 12pm

The public is welcome to attend in person at BRB 253 and via zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/6088045110

PSOC@Penn Seminar: "High-throughput multi-dimensional T cell profiling enabled systems immunology" (Ning Jenny Jiang)
2021-11-08 12:00 - 13:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

PICS Colloquium: "From atoms to emergent mechanisms with information bottleneck and diffusion probabilistic models"
2021-11-05 14:00 - 15:00 | Zoom – email kathom@seas.upenn.edu
Abstract: The ability to rapidly learn from high-dimensional data to make reliable predictions about the future is crucial in many contexts. This could be a fly avoiding predators, or the retina processing terabytes of data guiding complex human actions. Modern day artificial intelligence (AI) aims to mimic this fidelity and has been successful in many domains of life. It is tempting to ask if AI could also be used to understand and predict the emergent mechanisms across timescales for complex molecules with millions of atoms. In this talk I will show that certain flavors of AI can indeed help us understand generic molecular structure and dynamics, and also predict it even in situations with arbitrary long memories. However this requires close integration of AI with old and new ideas in statistical mechanics. I will talk about such methods developed by my group (1-3) using information bottleneck, denoising probabilistic models and long short-term memory networks, focusing on the first one or two frameworks in interest of time. I will demonstrate the methods on different problems, where we predict mechanisms at timescales much longer than milliseconds while keeping all-atom/femtosecond resolution. These include ligand dissociation from flexible protein/RNA and crystal nucleation with competing polymorphs.
References:
1. Wang, Y., Ribeiro, J.M.L. & Tiwary, P. Past–future information bottleneck for sampling molecular reaction coordinate simultaneously with thermodynamics and kinetics. Nat. Commun. 10, 3573 (2019).
2. Wang, Y., & Tiwary, P. Denoising diffusion probabilistic models for replica exchange. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.07369 (2021).
3. Tsai, S.T, Kuo, E.J. & Tiwary, P. Learning Molecular Dynamics with Simple Language Model built upon Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network. Nat. Commun. 11, 5115 (2020).

GRASP on Robotics: "Event-based Neuromorphic Perception and Computation: The Future of Sensing and AI"
2021-11-05 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Wu & Chen Auditorium and Virtual attendance via Zoom Webinar here.
There has been significant research over the past two decades in developing new systems for spiking neural computation. The impact of neuromorphic concepts on recent developments in optical sensing, display and artificial vision is presented. State-of-the-art image sensors suffer from severe limitations imposed by their very principle of operation. These sensors acquire the visual information as a series of ’snapshots’ recorded at discrete point in time, hence time-quantized at a predetermined frame rate, resulting in limited temporal resolution, low dynamic range and a high degree of redundancy in the acquired data. Nature suggests a different approach: Biological vision systems are driven and controlled by events happening within the scene in view, and not — like image sensors — by artificially created timing and control signals that have no relation whatsoever to the source of the visual information. Translating the frameless paradigm of biological vision to artificial imaging systems implies that control over the acquisition of visual information is no longer being imposed externally to an array of pixels but the decision making is transferred to the single pixel that handles its own information individually. It is demonstrated that bio-inspired vision systems have the potential to outperform conventional, frame-based vision acquisition and processing systems in many application fields and to establish new benchmarks in terms of redundancy suppression/data compression, dynamic range, temporal resolution and power efficiency to realize advanced functionality like 3D vision, object tracking, motor control, visual feedback loops and even allow us to rethink our current paradigm of computation. The ultimate goal is to develop brain-inspired general purpose computation architectures that can breach the current bottleneck introduced by the von Neumann architecture.

ODEI Spotlight: Critical Race Theory and DEI: From Theory to Practice
2021-11-04 17:30 - 19:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
The African-American Resource Center & Office of Affirmative Action Presents:

Critical Race Theory and DEI: From Theory to Practice
Join us as we examine the language switch from Critical Race Theory to Diversity Equity and Inclusion,
and what each term means and what DEI means and looks like at Penn.

Zoom Link:
http://upenn.zoom.us/j/7443577924

Panelists:
Beverly A. Crawford, Director of Diversity and Inclusion, Department of Preventive and Restorative Sciences
Captain W. Nicole McCoy, Commanding Officer of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Public Safety
Monica Monroe, Associate Dean for Equity & Inclusion, Carey Law School

Moderator:
Valerie Dorsey Allen, Director, African-American Resource Center

Keynote Speaker:
Chaz L. Howard, Penn’s Vice President for Social Equity and Community

MSE Seminar: "Lansdcapes of Glass"
2021-11-04 12:30 - 13:30 | Auditorium, LRSM Building, 3231 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
If cooled sufficiently quickly, the disorder of a liquid can be “quenched” or locked in place; the resulting amorphous solid is glass. Although it appears to be solid on human timescales, glass continues to creep due to thermal vibrations at the molecular scale. Consider now a pile of sand; it too is a disordered system, but the grains are too massive for such thermal effects to be relevant. Yet, soils in nature relentlessly creep, on hillslopes below the angle of repose. The unchallenged dogma is that this creep is driven by churning of soil by (bio)physical disturbances. River-bed sediments also creep, at flows below the threshold of motion, though this has received far less attention. In this talk Dr. Jerolmack focuses on recent work from his group and others that examines the origins of granular creep in hillslope and river systems, and the consequences of these findings for understanding actual landscapes. Our observations, arising from first-of-their-kind experiments and simulations, reveal surprises for both materials and geology. First, gravity-driven granular creep occurs with minimal disturbance, with rates and styles comparable to field observations. Second, this creep shares deep similarities with the behavior of glass, suggesting that mechanical disturbance in granular systems plays a role akin to thermal fluctuations in molecular systems. Third, fluid-driven creep in rivers has similar behavior to gravity-driven soil creep on hillsides. In both cases this creep acts to “harden” the bed, by compaction and the creation of structures that resist motion. Thus, sediment beds maintain a memory of their history of forcing, that dicates the threshold for landsliding (hillslopes) or entrainment (rivers). The upshot is that Earth’s landscapes appear to be glassy, and that viewing the Earth’s surface as a soft-matter landscape yields (pun intended) new insights with practical consequences.

Homecoming 2021: Penn Engineering Update and "Engineering living biology with nanomachines"
2021-11-03 17:00 - 18:00 | PA
This special event is part of the virtual programming for Penn Homecoming 2021 and is open to all alumni, parents, and friends. Nemirovsky Family Dean and Professor Vijay Kumar will give a State of the School Update including an overview of the newly established Center for Precision Engineering for Health, which will bring together researchers spanning multiple scientific fields to develop novel therapeutic biomaterials.
Dean Kumar’s update will be followed by a presentation, “Engineering living biology with nanomachines,” by Jennifer E. Phillips-Cremins, Associate Professor and Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Bioengineering and Genetics, and Marc Miskin, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering, with a moderated Q&A session.
Register here. After registration, attendees will receive a link to view the live discussion the day prior to the event.

Fall 2021 GRASP SFI: "Studying Bias and Representation in Sociotechnical Systems"
2021-11-03 15:00 - 16:00 | PA
*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and Virtual attendance via Zoom here…
Algorithms play a central role in our lives today, mediating our access to civic engagement, social connections, employment opportunities, news media and more. While the sociotechnical systems deploying these algorithms—search engines, social networking sites, and others—have the potential to dramatically improve human life, they also run the risk of reproducing or intensifying social inequities and tensions. In my research, I ask whether and how these systems are biased and how those biases impact users, towards the aim of building better ones. In this talk, I will describe my work conducting algorithm audits and randomized controlled user experiments to study representation and bias, touching on examples including my recent audits of gender and racial representation in image search results and partisan political media in web search. I will conclude by discussing my most recent work building tools to extend such audits into new domains and make them more accessible and sustainable for researchers.

ODEI Spotlight: Trauma Informed Care and LGBT Health
2021-11-02 19:00 - 20:00 | LGBT Center – 3907 Spruce Street, 3907 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, United States
Stephanie Tillman, CNM — the Feminist Midwife — will discuss LGBT health through the lens of trauma informed care. Registration required, more info TBA. Find full details on the event page here.

CIS Seminar: "Sketching Algorithms"
2021-11-02 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
A “sketch” is a data structure supporting some pre-specified set of queries and updates to a database while consuming space substantially (often exponentially) less than the information theoretic minimum required to store everything seen, and thus can also be seen as some form of functional compression. A “streaming algorithm” is simply a data structure that maintains a sketch dynamically as data is updated. The advantages of sketching include less memory consumption, faster algorithms, and reduced bandwidth requirements in distributed computing environments. Despite decades of work in the area, some of the most basic questions still remain open or were only resolved recently. In this talk, I survey recent results across a variety of sketching topics.

ESE Grace Hopper Lecture - "A Communications Perspective on Digital Privacy"
2021-11-02 11:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Many of the activities in cyberspace, from social networking to the use of mobile apps, leave digital footprints compromising the users’ privacy. As digital tracking technologies become more sophisticated and pervasive, there is a need to understand and quantify the users’ privacy risk, that is, what is the likelihood that users in cyberspace can be uniquely identified from their activities?
In this talk, we focus on de-anonymization attacks, where publicly and privately available information about users, represented as connectivity graphs, are leveraged to compromise user identities. We model the de-anonymization attack as a graph matching problem in which we have two correlated stochastic graphs the first of which has labeled vertices, whereas the second one is unlabeled. The goal is to recover the labels of the second graph by using the correlation structure. We explore how graph matching can be posed as a communications problem, and tools from information theory, communication theory and probability can be used to derive theoretical guarantees and algorithms for graph matching, thereby providing a framework for quantifying the privacy risk of users in the cyberspace.

MEAM Seminar: "Designing Robotic Systems with Collective Embodied Intelligence"
2021-11-02 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Natural swarms exhibit sophisticated colony-level behaviors with remarkable scalability and error tolerance. Their evolutionary success stems from more than just intelligent individuals, it hinges on their morphology, their physical interactions, and the way they shape and leverage their environment. Mound-building termites, for instance, are believed to use their own body as a template for construction; the resulting dirt mound serves, among other things, to regulate volatile pheromone cues which in turn guide further construction and colony growth. Throughout this talk I will argue how we can leverage the same principles to achieve greater performance in robot collectives, by paying attention to the interplay between control and hardware, as well as direct- and environmentally-mediated coordination between robots. I will exemplify the strength and challenges of this approach through cell-inspired, soft, single- and multi-robot systems for exploration; micro-scale robots for bio-medical applications; termite-inspired multi-robot systems for construction- and excavation; and bio-hybrid systems for agricultural monitoring.

PSOC@Penn Seminar: Cindy Reinhart King
2021-11-01 12:00 - 13:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

CBE PhD Dissertation Defense | “3D-stiffness Microenvironment Leads to Nuclear Envelope Rupture, DNA Damage, and Genome Variation”
2021-11-01 10:00 - 12:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
“Solid tumor cells grow in a stiff microenvironment with dense extracellular matrix (ECM) and condensed packing of adjacent cells. Tumor cells are capable of migrating through constricted pores formed by ECM or surrounded by other cells, and the nuclear envelope can break with repair factor mislocalization, further leading to DNA damage and genetic changes, or even accumulated to be genomic variations. Cell division, likewise, is confined by a stiff niche of adjacent cells and extracellular matrix, and such confinement has been reported to cause chromosome mis-segregation. The chromosome-loss live cell reporter system was developed to prove that cells undergoing specific types of chromosome missegregation can survive and maintain heritability, resulting in permanent genomic variations. Mitotic cells under in vitro confinement and in vivo conditions exhibit more abnormal division and more fluorescence-null reporter-negative cells, for both cancer and normal types. Confinement and SAC inhibition both lead to chromosome mis-segregation but do not superimpose, and Topoisomerase IIa plays an essential role in cells to survive after confined mitosis. Myosin II was found to lead to increased nuclear envelope rupture and, therefore, more DNA damage, while it protects mitotic cell rounding within 3D confined environments, since the increase of reporter-negative cells was observed after Myosin II knockdown. “

PICS Colloquium: "A model for external aerodynamics based on building-block flows"
2021-10-29 14:00 - 15:00 | PICS Conference Room 534 – A Wing , 5th Floor, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract: A wall model for large-eddy simulation is proposed by devising the flow as a collection of building blocks, whose information enables the prediction of the stress as the wall. The core assumption of the model is that simple canonical flows (such as turbulent channel flows, boundary layers, pipes, ducts, speed bumps, etc) contain the essential flow physics to devise accurate models. Three types of building block units are used to train the model, namely, turbulent channel flows, turbulent ducts, and turbulent boundary layers with separation. The approach is implemented using two interconnected artificial neural networks: a classifier, which identifies the contribution of each building block in the flow; and a predictor, which estimates the wall stress via non-linear combinations of building-block units. The output of the model is accompanied by the confidence in the prediction. The latter aids the detection of areas where the model underperforms, such as flow regions that are not representative of the building blocks used to train the model. The model is validated in a realistic aircraft geometry from NASA Juncture Flow Experiment, which is representative of external aerodynamic applications with trailing-edge separation.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Mechano-regulation of meniscus development and maturation" (Tonia Tsinman)
2021-10-29 11:00 - 13:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Rob Mauck are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Tonia Tsinman.

Title: “Mechano-regulation of meniscus development and maturation”

Date: October 29, 2021
Time: 11:00am

The public is welcome to attend via zoom at the following link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98160257924

GRASP on Robotics: "Planning on Graphs of Convex Sets"
2021-10-29 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Wu & Chen Auditorium and Virtual attendance via Zoom Webinar here.
Motivated by the challenging problems in planning and control through contact, our group has been working to connect more deeply the motion planning formulations we often use in robotics with a different lineage of algorithms and results in combinatorial optimization. What we’ve found surprised me: I feel that we’ve been formulating our mixed-integer motion planning problems incorrectly, and that there are better formulations that can lead to dramatically faster solve times and tighter convex relaxations. I’d like to tell you that story, through the lens of optimization-based collision-free motion planning. This is joint work with Tobia Marcucci, Jack Umenberger, and Pablo Parrilo. I’ll also briefly describe a few other ongoing projects in robotic manipulation, and promise to show some robot videos.

BE Seminar: "Systems-level Analyses of the Human Gut Microbiome" (Ilana Lauren Brito)
2021-10-28 15:30 - 16:30 | Moore 216, 200 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This seminar will be held live and broadcast on zoom – check your email for the link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu.
A major question regarding the human gut microbiota is: by what mechanisms do our most intimately associated organisms affect human health? In this talk, I will present several systems-level approaches that we have developed to address this fundamental question. My lab has pioneered methods that leverage protein-protein interactions to implicate bacterial proteins in human pathways linked to disease, revealing for the first time a network of interactions that affect diseases such as colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity that can be mined for novel therapeutics and therapeutic targets. I will present novel methods that that enable deeper insight into the transcriptome of organisms within our guts and their spatial localization. Finally, I will shift to the problem of the spread of antibiotic resistance, in which the gut microbiota are implicated. Pathogens become multi-drug resistance by acquiring resistance traits carried by the gut microbiota. Studying this process in microbiomes is inherently difficult using current methods. I will present several methods that enable tracking of genes within the microbiome and computational tools that predict the network of gene transfer between bacteria. Overall, these systems-level tools provide deep insight into the knobs we can turn to engineer outcomes within the microbiome that can improve human health.

MSE Grace Hopper Lecture: "Optics on the Nanoscale: Conquering Absorption with Nonlinear Optics"
2021-10-28 12:30 - 13:30 | Auditorium, LRSM Building, 3231 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Optical nanostructures enable molding the flow of light on the subwavelength scale rendering possible the realization of compact, cost-effective, flat and highly efficient optical components for imaging, spectroscopy, sensing, and communications. From the fundamental science viewpoint, light-matter interactions at the nanoscale reveal themselves in new and often unexpected ways. In fact, the usual linear and nonlinear macroscopic theories that describe the behavior of the electromagnetic field merit revision. From the applications viewpoint, miniaturized, tunable and reconfigurable functionalities implemented on a chip are of paramount importance. Here, we reassess dielectric materials such as chalcogenides as promising candidates for science and applications in wavelength ranges once thought to be hostile to the propagation of light. We show that, in fact, these materials constitute new, excellent contenders for developing new, multi-functional nanophotonic devices due to their high linear refractive indices, strong nonlinear response, and fast switching speeds. To date, applications of these glasses have been limited to wavelength ranges where absorption meticulously avoided, for example, above 500nm for As2S3: high absorption at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths manifests itself through the large imaginary parts of the dielectric constants. However, we demonstrate that, as counterintuitive as it may appear, highly nonlinear, properly nanostructured chalcogenide glass, transparent in the mid- and near-infrared, can also be used to generate third harmonic frequencies in the visible and ultraviolet part of the spectrum, despite the presence of strong material absorption in this range. Such third-harmonic generation can be tuned and further enhanced using stacked metasurfaces and various mechanisms of local field enhancement, including Mie and quasi-bound states in continuum resonances.
