• MEAM Seminar: “Manipulating Mechanical Wave Propagation with Phononic Materials”

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

    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 […]

    CIS Seminar: “Sparse View Synthesis”

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    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, […]

    ASSET Seminar: “​When Is a Conformal Set, a Conformal Set?”

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

    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 […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Roberto Martín-Martín, University of Texas at Austin, “Making Mobile Manipulation Real: New Learning Paradigms for Robots”

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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 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 […]

    CBE Seminar: “Computational Approaches for Understanding and Engineering Biomolecular Condensates” (Jerelle Joseph, Princeton University)

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    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 […]

    MSE Seminar: “Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing – Useful Quantum Devices in the NISQ Era” – Burns Healy – Dell Technologies

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

    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 […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “From Circuits to Cognition: Silicon for Embodied Intelligence”

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

    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 […]

    FOLDS seminar: Weak to Strong Generalization in Random Feature Models

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

    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 […]

    CIS Seminar: “Inverse Problems using Generative Priors”

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

    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 […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Kris Hauser, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign & Samsung Research America, “Modeling and Reasoning About ‘Stuff’”

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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 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 […]

  • Fall 2025 GRASP Seminar: Aljoša Ošep, NVIDIA, “Segmenting More Than Meets the Eye: Towards Amodal 4D Segmentation”

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 306 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    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 […]