• ASSET Seminar: “Unpacking the Unintended Consequences of AI in Education”

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

    The rapid integration of AI into educational settings presents opportunities and challenges—this talk will discuss findings from three large-scale field studies investigating the impact of AI on student learning. First, we found that unfettered access to ChatGPT negatively impacted short-term student learning outcomes. Second, to understand longer-term effects, we examined learning in chess academies. Contrary […]

    ESE Guest Seminar: “The Versatility of Perovskite Materials for Optoelectronics”

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    Greenberg Lounge (Room 114), Skirkanich Hall 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have created much excitement in the past years and attract spotlight attention. This talk will provide an overview of the reasons for this development highlighting the historic development as well as the specific material properties that make perovskites so attractive for the research community. The current challenges are exemplified using a […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Suraj Nair, Physical Intelligence, “Scaling Robot Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models”

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    Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    This speaker will present virtually. This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.  ABSTRACT The last several years have witnessed tremendous progress in the capabilities of AI systems, driven largely by foundation models that scale expressive architectures with diverse data sources. While the impact of this technology […]

    CBE Seminar: “Dynamic Interactions Between Copper Active Sites in Zeolites During NOx Pollution Abatement Catalysis” (Rajamani Gounder, Purdue University)

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    Abstract: The selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of nitrogen oxides (NOx) with ammonia using Cu-exchanged zeolites is a pollution abatement technology used commercially in diesel emissions control. At low temperatures (<523 K), Cu ion active sites become solvated by ammonia reactants to form homogeneous-like copper coordination complexes that are bonded ionically to anionic aluminum centers in […]

    MSE Seminar: “On-Chip Topological Photonics for terahertz 6G to XG Wireless” – Ranjan Singh – University of Notre Dame

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    The era of global digitalization and the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence-driven data applications have set their sights on terabits per second (Tbps) communication links. The limitations of the rapidly advancing 5G network in meeting this demand, attributed to challenges such as bandwidth scarcity, have spurred the exploration of innovative technologies for the envisioned 6G […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “New Pathways for Energy Efficient Computing Hardware”

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

    This winter the Americans will see a price hike in their electricity bill – not because of any issues related to energy generation but rather because of the rapidly increasing energy demand by the Data Centers.   Energy efficiency is becoming critical not only to maintain the incessant advanced march of computing, but also to ensure […]

    FOLDS seminar: An Information Geometric Understanding of Deep Learning

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

    Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722   I will argue that properties of natural data are what predominantly make deep networks so effective. To that end, I will show that deep networks work well because of a characteristic structure in the space of learnable tasks. The input correlation matrix for typical tasks has a “sloppy” eigenspectrum where eigenvalues decay […]

    BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: Katherine Mossburg

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    The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. David Cormode are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Katherine Mossburg. Title: "Developing Silver Sulfide-Based Nanoparticles for Imaging and Treatment of Breast Cancer" Location: Alison Pouch (chair), Andrew Maidment, David Issadore Date: Friday, October 24, 2025 Time: 10:00 AM Location: Raisler Lounge, Towne […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Alan Yuille, Johns Hopkins University, “3D Vision Language Models and Interactive 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 Vision Language Models (VLMs) are extremely successful, but their performance degrades when asked questions involving spatial relations and 3D world knowledge. Inspired by Cognitive Science, we develop 3D VLMs which are 3D-aware and 3D-explicit to help us to diagnose their failure nodes. We […]

    PICS Colloquium: Powering decarbonization with modeling and optimization of renewables in the multi-scale atmosphere with Michael F. Howland

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

    To meet net-zero carbon emissions targets by mid-century, up to a ~30-fold increase in wind power capacity is required. Acceleration to this rate requires urgent improvements to efficiency and reliability of installed wind farms, as well as cost reductions for future offshore farms. To expand energy production, wind turbines are rapidly increasing in size, wind […]

    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, […]