• 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, […]

    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 […]