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    • MEAM Seminar: “Controlling Adhesion and Friction of Soft Interfaces by Meso-Scale Structures”

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

    Discoveries of unique adhesive and frictional properties in biological attachment systems have, over the past two decades, demonstrated how near-surface architecture at lengths between the molecular (a few nm) and continuum (mm) scales can be used to achieve interesting and unique surface mechanical properties. This has spurred considerable research activity in design of meso-scale, near-surface […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Design and control of dynamical systems: a classical to quantum perspective”

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

    The design and control of dynamical systems have long been core objectives of engineering. In this thesis, we tackle the complexities of design and control across paradigms ranging from Boolean models of genetic networks, to thermally driven stochastic systems, to quantum-mechanical systems. These disparate domains share common challenges, including the large dimensionality of the design […]

    CIS Seminar: “Machine learning for discovery: deciphering RNA splicing logic”

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

    Recent advances in machine learning such as deep learning have led to powerful tools for modeling complex data with high predictive accuracy. However, the resulting models are typically black box, limiting their usefulness in scientific discovery. I will describe an ``interpretable-by-design'' machine learning model capturing a fundamental cellular process known as RNA splicing. Our model […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “Power to the People (and to the Datacenters)! Achieving the dream of a clean and reliable electricity supply”

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    Towne 327

    Most of us think of electricity as a clean and reliable source of energy, which flows out of the plug whenever we need it. The reality is far more complex. The reliability of our electricity supply is increasingly threatened by extreme weather, causing more frequent power outages. The cleanliness of our electricity supply varies greatly […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Robustness in the Era of LLMs: Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses”

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

    Abstract: Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, popular LLMs such as chatGPT, Llama, Claude, and Gemini are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. For this reason, interest has grown in improving the robustness of LLMs against such attacks. In this talk, we review the current state of […]

    Fall 2024 GRASP SFI: Baxi Chong, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Mechanical intelligence in locomotion: from information theory to mesoscale robots”

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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 Locomotion in complex environments (e.g., rubble, leaf litter, granular media) is essential to mobile engineered systems such as robots. Effective locomotion requires complex control strategies to interact with terrain heterogeneity. Computational intelligence (CI), which typically includes rapid […]

    BRITTON CHANCE DISTINGUISHED LECTURE (CBE): “Next-generation Cancer Therapeutics Guided by Structural, Mechanistic, and Biophysical Properties” (Jennifer Cochran, Stanford University)

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

    Bio & Abstract: Jennifer Cochran is the Macovski Professor of Bioengineering and Senior Associate Vice Provost for Research at Stanford University. Prof. Cochran was recruited in 2005 as one of the founding faculty members in Stanford’s Bioengineering department and served as its Chair from 2017-2022. She is also a member of the chemical engineering, immunology, […]

    MSE Seminar: “Opportunities in Whispering-Gallery Microresonators: Fundamentals and Applications”

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

    Light-matter interactions form the fundamental basis for numerous phenomena and processes in optical devices. This talk will cover ultra-high-quality (Q) whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) optical microresonators which have an unprecedented capability to trap light in a highly confined volume smaller than a strand of human hair. Light-matter interactions are significantly enhanced in high-quality WGM resonators, creating the […]

    PICS Colloquium: Combining High-Throughput Workflows, Quantum Chemistry, and AI for the Discovery of Tunable Materials with Unprecedented Properties

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

    The solutions to many of society’s most pressing problems rely on the discovery of materials with unprecedented physical and chemical properties that are tailored to an application of interest. Typically, it is not a matter of incremental improvements over existing technologies; rather, there is often an urgent need to identify new kinds of materials altogether. […]

    MSE Thesis Defense: “Imaginary-Index-Driven Programmable Integrated Photonics for Optical Computing and Networking”

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    Zoom

    Photonics serves as the backbone of modern information infrastructure, transmitting and processing data at unparalleled speeds with minimal energy consumption by harnessing the inherent parallelism, high-frequency operation, and expansive bandwidths. In the past decade, the surging advancements of artificial intelligence has revolutionized the traditional definition of computing algorithms. By bridging the gap between optical hardware and software-defined functionality, programmable integrated […]

    • MEAM Seminar: “Powering the Future Through Hydrogen Hubs and International Partnerships for Materials and Engineering System Solutions”

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

    The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable and reliable clean energy solutions, to tackle the toughest remaining barriers to addressing the climate crisis and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Specifically, the Hydrogen Energy Shot seeks to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% in […]

    ASSET Seminar: “Towards Pluralistic Alignment: Foundations for Learning from Diverse Human Preferences”

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

    Abstract: Large pre-trained models trained on internet-scale data are often not ready for safe deployment out-of-the-box. They are heavily fine-tuned and aligned using large quantities of human preference data, usually elicited using pairwise comparisons. While aligning an AI/ML model to human preferences or values, it is important to ask whose preference and values we are […]