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    • MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Pneumatic Actuation in Soft Robotic System”

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    CTA

    Soft robotic systems, constructed from compliant and adaptive materials, offer advantages such as safe interaction with humans, flexibility in motion, and the ability to conform to unstructured environments. These capabilities make them promising for applications in healthcare, manufacturing, and exploration. A central challenge, however, is the development of actuation strategies that are versatile, efficient, and […]

    CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Gas Encapsulating Microcapsules (GEMs)” (CK Yeh)

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    Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Room 121 231 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Abstract: Microcapsules that can respond under hydrostatic pressure would open a new avenue of application in ultrasound- or impact-induced release of therapeutic agents. While microcapsules that are designed to release cargo under uniaxial compressive loadings have been developed, they are filled with liquid, rendering them insensitive to hydrostatic pressure. To overcome this limitation, bubbles can […]

    CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Engineering Multiphasic Processes to Enhance Droplet Microfluidics and Biofuel Conversion” (Owen Land)

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    Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Room 121 231 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Abstract: Multiphasic processes underpin nearly every aspect of modern life; from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the medicines that sustain us and the energy systems that power our world. This thesis presents three contributions to the advancement of multiphasic processes by developing intelligent control, scalable processing, and reactor design. First, […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Taking Advantage of Coherent Vortex Wakes: Formation Flight and High Density Tidal Energy Harvesting”

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

    Wake flows - the fluid mechanical "debris" shed behind an aerodynamic body - are often characterized by unsteady, turbulent, low-momentum fluid. Usually these wakes are to be avoided, but in several situations the wake can exhibit an organized structure consisting of well-defined high energy vortices. Examples of these coherent, or structured, wakes include trailing vortex […]

    • ASSET Seminar: “Title TBD”

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

    Abstract TBD   Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98963621993

    Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Binghao Huang, Columbia University, “Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation”

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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 Tactile and visual perception are crucial for fine-grained human interactions with the environment. Developing similar multimodal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation skills. This talk presents a scalable tactile stack that couples flexible, […]

    MSE Seminar: “Quantum Technologies with Atom-Light Interaction” Chuanwei Zhang – Washington University in St. Louis

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

    From knotted cords to contemporary computers, the revolution in information technologies has been a major driving force of human civilization. Since its emergence in the early 1900s, quantum mechanics has played a foundational role in enabling many transformative technologies—such as lasers and transistors—that are now recognized as hallmarks of the first quantum revolution. Over the […]

    FOLDS seminar: Theory and practice of LLM quantization

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

    Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722   Modern LLMs process information by repeatedly applying a basic primitive of matrix multiplication. Estimates show that about 60-84% of the energy consumed by LLMs goes into memory load/store operations. How can we reduce this power consumption? Tokens start as about 16-bit integers but get mapped to vectors of floats of length […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Jiatao Gu, University of Pennsylvania, “Towards Robust World Models”

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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 Autonomous agents need a world model that explains observations, predicts what comes next, and chooses actions over long horizons. Think of catching a ball: the robot must infer where it is now and where it will be next—even when it slips out of […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Microscopic Surface Electrochemical Actuators for Voltage-Tunable Optical Elements”

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    Brand Details

    Surface electrochemical actuators (SEAs) harness ion-induced surface stress changes to produce large bending deformations at the microscale. They have previously been applied in microrobot locomotion and microbattery validation, demonstrating their versatility as low-voltage microscopic actuators. Here, we extend their functionality by showing that ultra-thin platinum membranes (10 nm thick, 10–100 µm wide), fabricated via low-temperature […]

    PICS Colloquium: Flow and heat transfer over rough walls: fundamental physics, numerical simulations, and bulk parametrizations with Elie Bou-Zeid

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

    Understanding the physical processes modulating the transport of scalars, such as heat, over very rough surfaces is essential for understanding the thermal environment of cities, how wind and solar farms modify heat and water exchanges between the atmosphere and Earth surface, and parameterizing surface physics in coarser Earth systems models. This talk examines this problem […]