Penn Engineering Events

PSOC Seminar: "Compromised nuclear envelope integrity leads to tumor cell invasion" (Guilherme Nader, CHOP)
2022-09-26 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York) | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Fall 2022 Hybrid-Seminar Series
Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST)
Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge
For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu

ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "Lattice Theory in Multi-Agent Systems"
2022-09-26 14:00 - 15:30 | Moore 317, 200 S 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Ordered sets model signals such as binary relations, concepts, partitions, rankings, matchings, events, as well as other taxa of information, temporal, hierarchical, relational, or, in general, logical in nature. We argue that (order-) lattice-based (networked) multi-agent systems constitute a broad class of systems in which data fusion, consensus, synchronization, and other collaborative tasks are described with lattices and Galois connections (maps between lattices that preserve structure). Mathematically speaking, these systems are network sheaves. Motivated by analogous vector diffusion and consensus algorithms, we initiate a discrete Hodge theory with the Tarski Laplacian, a diffusion operator—analogous to the graph Laplacian and the graph connection Laplacian—acting on assignments of lattice-valued data to the nodes of a network. The Hodge-Tarski theorem (Main Theorem) relates the fixed point theory of the Tarski Laplacian to the global sections (consistent signals, equilibria, if you will) of the sheaf. We present novel applications in signal processing and multi-modal semantics where we design a consensus algorithm on statements such as “I know that she knows that he doesn’t know that I’m defending my thesis.”

MEAM Seminar: "Development of Astronomical Instrumentation to Study the Birth and Evolution of the Universe"
2022-09-27 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The study of the early universe requires deep high-resolution maps of the sky at millimeter and submillimeter. This requires the development of state-of-the-art cryogenic receivers and custom built telescopes. These instruments operate in extreme locations including from NASA launched high-altitude balloons over Antarctica and high (5,200m/17,000ft) mountain tops in Northern Chile adding a level of planning and complexity beyond what is normally required for astronomical observations. I will discuss the science goals of these instruments and how we develop instruments at Penn to meet these goals.

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "Surface and Interface Engineering in Manipulation and Fabrication of Colloid-Based Sub-Microporous Hierarchical Materials and Their Applications"
2022-09-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Moore 212
Nanolattices exhibit attractive mechanical, energy conversion, and optical properties, but it is challenging to fabricate nanolattices in large scale while maintaining the dense hierarchical nanometer features that enable their properties. Current advanced fabrication methods, like 3D printing or self-assembly, are significantly limited by their scalability or the cracking problem in the assembled templates. This work focuses on self-assembly of metallic inverse opals, a particular type of nanolattices, to overcome these limitations via developing a theoretical model for understanding the cracking problem and a crack-free self-assembly method to scale-up the fabrication and to characterize and explore applications of metallic inverse opals.
The developed model incorporates film yielding, particle order, and interfacial friction to explain several experimental observations and helps solving the cracking problem. It is found that the key to solving the cracking problem is to manipulate the surface and interface properties of particles and substrates. The developed crack-free self-assembly approach results in centimeter-scale nickel inverse opals with much larger crack-free area than prior self-assembled and much more unit cells than 3D-printed nanolattices, demonstrating a tensile strength of 260 MPa. It is also found that drop-casting can achieve fast, high-quality, and large-scale self-assembly via pre-assembly in highly concentrated micro/nanoparticle suspension.
Based on these development and findings, two applications of metallic inverse opals have been demonstrated, including a mechanochromic bending sensor and a magnetic sorting chip for capturing disease-related extracellular vesicles. The developed sensor is wireless and power-free, can utilize full visible spectrum, and has a 10X higher strain sensitivity than other mechanochromic sensors. The fabricated sorting chip achieves >109 nanoscale magnetophoretic sorting devices in a postage-stamp-sized lattice with >70x magnetic traps and >20x improved enrichment for magnetic nanoparticles versus previous studies.
The understanding of cracking in particle templates, the developed self-assembly methods, and the application demonstrations reported in this work may advance the fabrication and applications of high-strength multifunctional porous materials, providing fundamental insights into the design, synthesis, and control of complex hierarchical materials that employ colloid self-assembly.

ASSET Seminar: Equivariance in Deep Learning, Kostas Daniilidis (University of Pennsylvania)
2022-09-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT
Traditional convolutional networks exhibit unprecedented robustness to intraclass nuisances when trained on big data. Generalization with respect to geometric transformations has been achieved via expensive data augmentation. It has been shown recently that data augmentation can be avoided if networks are structured such that feature representations are transformed the same way as the input, a desirable property called equivariance. In this talk, we show how equivariance can be realized via group convolutions, how to deal with vector and tensor fields, and how we achieve equivariance in transformers. We present results on 3D shape classification and scene reconstruction based on learning only objects but not scenes.
BIO
Kostas Daniilidis has been faculty at the University of Pennsylvania since 1998. He is an IEEE Fellow. He was the director of the GRASP laboratory from 2008 to 2013. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe (now KIT) in 1992. He is a co-recipient of the Best Conference Paper Award at ICRA 2017. Kostas’ main interest today is in geometric deep learning, event-based neuromorphic vision, and their applications in vision-based manipulation and navigation.

Fall 2022 GRASP SFI: Millind Tambe, Harvard University, "Results from deployments for public health and conservation"
2022-09-28 15:30 - 16:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and Virtual attendance via Zoom here…

ABSTRACT
With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. I will focus on domains of public health and conservation, and address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to effectively deploy our limited intervention resources in these problem domains. I will present results from work around the globe in using AI for challenges in public health such as Maternal and Child care interventions, HIV prevention, and in conservation such as endangered wildlife protection. Achieving social impact in these domains often requires methodological advances. To that end, I will highlight key research advances in multiagent reasoning and learning, in particular in, restless multiarmed bandits, influence maximization in social networks, computational game theory and decision-focused learning. In pushing this research agenda, our ultimate goal is to facilitate local communities and non-profits to directly benefit from advances in AI tools and techniques.

Fall 2022 GRASP Seminar: Guillermo Gallego, Technical University Berlin, "Stereo depth and optical flow estimation via contrast maximization of event camera data”
2022-09-29 10:00 - 11:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This is a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.
ABSTRACT
Event cameras are novel vision sensors that mimic functions from the human retina and offer potential advantages over traditional cameras (low latency, high speed, high dynamic range, etc.). They acquire visual information in the form of pixel-wise brightness changes, called events. This talk presents event processing approaches for motion estimation in computer vision and robotics applications. In particular, we will discuss recent advances by the Robotic Interactive Perception Lab at TU Berlin in extending the contrast maximization framework to stereo depth and optical flow estimation while avoiding its Achilles’ heel: event collapse.

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "Room-temperature Electrochemical Healing of Structural Metals"
2022-09-29 10:00 - 11:00 | Greenberg Lounge (Room 114), Skirkanich Hall, 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
For over 6,000 years, repairing high-strength metallic materials has required high temperatures and large energy inputs. Likewise, recent innovations in self-healing and repairable metals have remained limited by the need for heating, the small size of repairable cracks, and the low strength and constrained chemical composition of healed metals. While welding remains the most widely used approach to repair metals, the increasing ubiquity of digital manufacturing and “unweldable” alloys call for radically different approaches. This thesis pioneers a new approach for repairing structural metals at room-temperature, termed “electrochemical healing”. First, by mimicking the transport-mediated healing of bone, selective nickel electrodeposition enables rapid, effective, low-energy, and room-temperature healing of a cellular metal. A polymer coating restricts electrodeposition only at fracture or high stress sites, and a statistical method quantifies and predicts the probability of a target recovery of tensile strength based on energy input. This thesis extends room-temperature healing to low-carbon steel, a widely used structural metal, by elucidating how ion transport and electrolyte chemistry influence growth morphology and strength in fractured steel wires repaired with nickel electrodeposition. Pulsed electroplating and electrolyte chemistry selection improve nickel adhesion and enable fully fractured steel wires to recover up to 69% of their pristine strength. Finally, this thesis presents a framework for effective room temperature electrochemical healing based on a quantitative model that links geometric, mechanical, and electrochemical parameters to the recovery of tensile strength in repaired metals. This framework enables full recovery of tensile strength in a variety of structural metals, including “unweldable” alloys and a 3D-printed difficult-to-weld funicular shellular structure, as well as over 100% recovery of toughness in an aluminum alloy. The model reveals scaling relationships for the energetic, financial, and time costs of repairing metals that facilitate the practical adoption of electrochemical healing. Room-temperature electrochemical healing could open exciting possibilities for the scalable, autonomous, repeatable, and prophylactic repair of metals in structures and robots, enable cellular materials that respond to environmental stimulus with growth and morphogenesis, and advance the life cycle sustainability of structural metals.

MEAM Seminar: "Harnessing Physical Intelligence for High-Performance Soft Robots"
2022-09-29 10:30 - 11:30 | Towne 227 (MEAM Conference Room), 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Different from neuron-based computational intelligence through the brain, physical intelligence leverages structural designs and smart materials to physically encode sensing, actuation, control, adaption, and decision-making into the body of an agent. The stimuli-responsive body materials can enable autonomous sensory, actuation, powering, and other physical intelligence functions. The structural designs of soft body can simplify the required actuation for deformation and motion, as well as enable real-time feedback control-free locomotion and self-adaption.
In this talk, I will discuss our recent work in embodying mechanical intelligence of structural designs and/or materials intelligence of soft active materials in soft robotics, for achieving delicacy in manipulation, high speed and high efficiency in locomotion, and autonomy and intelligence. First, I will talk about utilizing the ancient paper cutting art of kirigami for programming 3D curved shape shifting via geometric mechanics guided design, as well as its application in nondestructive and delicate grasping. Then, I will discuss how to leverage bistability and multistability for achieving high-speed and high-efficient terrestrial and aqueous soft robots. Finally, I will discuss examples of integrating structural designs with soft active materials for achieving autonomy and intelligence in soft robots.

POSTPONED // MSE Seminar & Grace Hopper Lecture: “Materials for Quantum Technologies Through a Computational Lens"
2022-09-29 10:30 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Refreshments served at 10:15 AM
In this talk, I will describe theoretical and computational strategies based on quantum mechanical calculations, aimed at predicting material properties suitable for the development of quantum technologies. Specifically, I will discuss the electronic structure and coherent states of spin defects in two- and three-dimensional semiconductors and insulators, obtained using both classical and near-term quantum computers.

Fall 2022 GRASP Seminar: Joshua Jeanson, University of Pennsylvania, "IP in Academic and Corporate Research Settings"
2022-09-30 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This seminar is for internal Penn students and faculty only.

ABSTRACT
An overview of Intellectual Property and a discussion on best practices for protecting your creations and ideas in light of employment obligations.

ESE/CIS Joint Seminar: "Future Heterogeneous Systems Need More First-Class Citizens"
2022-09-30 11:00 - 12:00 | Heilmeier Hall (Room 100), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
In recent years, system designers have increasingly been turning to heterogeneous systems to improve performance and energy efficiency. Specialized accelerators are frequently used to improve the efficiency of computations that run inefficiently on conventional, general-purpose processors. As a result, systems ranging from smartphones to datacenters, hyperscalers, and supercomputers are increasingly using large numbers of accelerators (including GPUs) while providing better efficiency than CPU-based solutions. In particular, GPUs are widely used in these systems due to their combination of programmability and efficiency. Traditionally, GPUs are throughput-oriented, focused on data parallelism, and assume synchronization happens at a coarse granularity. However, programmers have begun using these systems for a wider variety of applications which exhibit different characteristics, including latency-sensitivity, mixes of both task and data parallelism, and fine-grained synchronization. Thus, future heterogeneous systems must evolve and make deadline-aware scheduling, more intelligent data movement, efficient fine-grained synchronization, and effective power management first-order design constraints. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss our efforts to apply hardware-software co-design to help future heterogeneous systems overcome these challenges and improve performance, energy efficiency, and scalability. Then, in the second part I will discuss how the on-going transition to chiplet-based heterogeneous systems exacerbates these challenges and my vision for extending our work to address these challenges in chiplet-based heterogeneous systems by rethinking the control plane.

Theory Seminar- Rachel Cummings (Columbia University)
2022-09-30 12:00 - 13:00 | Room 401B, 3401 Walnut, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

PRECISE Seminar: Investigate and Mitigate the Attacks Caused by Out-of-Band Signals
2022-09-30 12:00 - 14:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
Abstract

Sensing and actuation systems are entrusted with increasing intelligence to perceive the environment and react to it. Their reliability often relies on the trustworthiness of sensors. As process automation and robotics keep evolving, sensing methods such as pressure/temperature/motion sensing are extensively used in conventional systems and rapidly emerging applications. This talk aims to investigate the threats incurred by the out-of-band signals and discuss the low-cost defense methods against physical injection attacks on sensors. Dr. Hei will present the results from her USENIX Security, ACM CCS, and ASIACCS papers. [Zoom]

Speaker Bio

Xiali (Sharon) Hei is an Alfred and Helen M. Lamson Endowed assistant professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Prior to joining the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, she was an assistant professor at Delaware State University from 2015-2017 and an assistant professor at Frostburg State University from 2014-2015. Dr. Hei received her Ph.D. in computer science from Temple University in 2014.
She was awarded an NSF MRI Track 2 award, a Facebook award, an LA BoRSF CEMC Talent Initiative Fund, an LA BoRSF Seed fund, a 20-million NSF ERSCoR RII Track 1 award, an NSF CRII award, and a Delaware DEDO grant, etc. Also, she earned an M.S. in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University. She got several awards such as ACM 2014 MobiHoc Best Poster Runner-up Award, Dissertation Completion Fellowship, The Bronze Award Best Graduate Project in Future of Computing Competition, etc. Her papers were published at USENIX Security Symp., ACM CCS, IEEE European Symp. on Security and Privacy, IEEE INFOCOM, RAID, ASIACCS, etc. She is a TPC member of the USENIX Security Symp. , IEEE Euro S&P, Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security & Trust (PST), IEEE GLOBECOM, SafeThings, AutoSec, IEEE ICC, WASA, etc. She is an IEEE senior member since 2019.

MEAM Seminar: "Manipulation of Micro/Nano Particles Using Acoustic Waves"
2022-10-04 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Manipulation of particles in micro and nano scale has been invaluable in a variety of scenarios in applied physics, chemistry and biomedicine. Acoustic microfluidics has emerged as a powerful and novel platform for micro/nano manipulation in many applications recently due to its advantages in versatility, low cost, easy to integrate and manufacture, miniaturization, energy efficiency, etc.. Here, I will first introduce the development of acoustic tweezer which can manipulation objects from nano to mm scale on a chip. I will then report our most recent breakthroughs on acoustic manipulation, including (1) acoustic thermal shift assay for protein manipulation and characterization, (2) internal structure manipulation of a novel endoskeletal droplet using acoustic waves, and (3) staged assembly of colloids.

Penn Engineering 2021-22 Heilmeier Award Lecture: Ritesh Agarwal
2022-10-04 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
“Utilizing Quantum Geometry and Topology for Enabling Integrated Chiral Photonics”
Classical and quantum computing devices need to ferry vast amounts of data, and optical interconnects provide a promising approach allowing faster speeds and larger bandwidths. Critical interconnect components are light sources, waveguides and detectors. Currently, the information is encoded in intensity and frequency but other degrees of freedom (DOFs) such as photon spin and spatial orbital angular momentum modes (OAM) should be utilized to enhance the capacity of optical links. Therefore, new photonic materials and devices that can produce, transmit and detect light with complex polarization and spatial modes are needed. This is non-trivial as most materials are insensitive to chiral light. In this talk, Dr. Agarwal will discuss recent developments towards the development of on-chip lasers, waveguides and photodetectors that are sensitive to photon spin and OAM modes. By protecting or breaking certain symmetries and utilizing the quantum geometry of the engineered system, new devices will be discussed that can enable the development of integrated chiral photonic systems.
Read the full award announcement here. More information about the Heilmeier Award can be found here.

ASSET Seminar: Learning with Small Data, Pratik Chaudhari (University of Pennsylvania)
2022-10-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
The relevant limit for machine learning is not N → infinity but instead N → 0. The human visual system is proof that it is possible to learn categories with extremely few samples. This talk will discuss steps towards building such systems and it is structured in three parts. The first part will discuss algorithms to adapt representations of deep networks to new categories with few labeled data. The second part will discuss when such adaptation works well and when it does not. It will develop a method to compute the optimal distance between two learning tasks and algorithmic tools to learn tasks that are far away from each other. The third part will discuss how make the optimal use of unlabeled data to learn a task.
This talk will discuss results from the following papers.
1. An Information-Geometric Distance on the Space of Tasks. Yansong
Gao, Pratik Chaudhari. ICML 2021.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00613, Code: https://github.com/Yansongga/An-Information-Geometric-Distance-on-the-Space-of-Tasks
2. Model Zoo: A Growing “Brain” That Learns Continually. Rahul
Ramesh, Pratik Chaudhari. ICLR 22.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03027. Code:
https://github.com/rahul13ramesh/MultitTask_ModelZoo
3. Deep Reference Priors: What is the best way to pretrain a model?. Yansong Gao, Rahul Ramesh, and Pratik Chaudhari. ICML 22.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00187, Code: https://github.com/grasp-lyrl/deep_reference_priors

Fall 2022 GRASP SFI: Ross Hatton, Oregon State University, "Snakes & Spiders, Robots & Geometry"
2022-10-05 15:00 - 16:00 | Room 307, Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and Virtual attendance via Zoom here…
ABSTRACT
Locomotion and perception are a common thread between robotics and biology. Understanding these phenomena at a mechanical level involves nonlinear dynamics and the coordination of many degrees of freedom. In this talk, I will discuss geometric approaches to organizing this information in two problem domains: Undulatory locomotion of snakes and swimmers, and vibration propagation in spider webs.
In the first section, I will discuss how differential geometry and Lie group theory provide insight into the locomotion of undulating systems through a vocabulary of lengths, areas, and curvatures. In particular, a tool called the *Lie bracket* combines these geometric concepts to describe the effects of cyclic changes in the locomotor’s shape, such as the gaits used by swimming or crawling systems. Building on these results, I will demonstrate that the geometric techniques are useful beyond the “clean” ideal systems on which they have traditionally been developed, and can provide insight into the motion of systems with considerably more complex dynamics, such as locomotors in granular media.
In the second section, I will turn my attention to vibration propagation through spiders’ webs. Due to poor eyesight, many spiders rely on web vibrations for situational awareness. Web-borne vibrations are used to determine the location of prey, predators, and potential mates. The influence of web geometry and composition on web vibrations is important for understanding spider’s behavior and ecology. Past studies on web vibrations have experimentally measured the frequency response of web geometries by removing threads from existing webs. We have constructed physical artificial webs and computer models to better understand the effect of web structure on vibration transmission. These models provide insight into the propagation of vibrations through the webs, the frequency response of the bare web, and the influence of the spider’s mass and stiffness on the vibration transmission patterns.

CBE Seminar Series: "Genome and Epigenome Editing for Gene Therapy and Cell Programming" (Charles A. Gersbach, Duke University)
2022-10-05 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

Fall 2022 Safe Space Training for Penn Engineering Faculty & Staff - Day 1
2022-10-06 14:00 - 16:00 | 217 Towne – Forman Active Learning Classroom, 220 South 33rd Street, Towne 217, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The School of Engineering and Applied Science has partnered with the university’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center to offer Safe Space Training for interested faculty and staff on Thursday, October 6th from 2pm-4pm and Friday, October 7th from 10am-12pm in the Forman Active Learning Classroom (217 Towne).
Attendance at both sessions is required to complete the training in full.
This four-hour training program is designed to educate faculty and staff on how to better support LGBTQ+ individuals on our campus and in our classrooms. Those who participate will then be eligible to display a Safe Space sticker in their office, indicating their active roles in promoting an accepting environment for all, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. The Safe Space Program has been shown to be an effective tool in helping LGBTQ+ students feel safe and included in the campus community.
To attend the workshops, please register by September 29th using the website link below.
Brunch will be provided during the training session on Friday morning, and there is space for up to 40 individuals. If there is sufficient interest, additional training sessions will be scheduled for later in the year. Please contact Emily Delany at eedelany@seas.upenn.edu with any additional questions.

Fall 2022 Safe Space Training for Penn Engineering Faculty & Staff - Day 2
2022-10-07 10:00 - 12:00 | 217 Towne – Forman Active Learning Classroom, 220 South 33rd Street, Towne 217, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

Rare Earth Element Recovery
2022-10-07 11:00 - 12:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
Diverse clean energy technologies rely on critical elements, e.g. rare earths, whose separation and purification pose unique challenges. And whose environmental footprints are severe. Dr. Eric Schelter, Dr. Kate Stebe, and Dr. Daniel Nothaft will discuss the challenges and new ideas to meet them.

Chester, PA & Environmental Justice
2022-10-10 11:00 - 12:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
This panel will discuss the state of affairs in Chester PA and environmental (in)justice. Current research and community assessment of environmental vulnerability of Chester will be presented, air quality control issues will be discussed as well as community efforts for empowerment and legislative action.

Speakers:
Jennifer Horney, University of Delaware

Dora Williams, Community Organizer and Activist

Echo Alford, Community Organizer, Clean Air Council of Philadelphia

Kearni Nichelle Warren, Community Organizer and Activist

Beyond Techno-Economics: Responsible Deployment in Carbon Management
2022-10-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Kleinman Energy Forum, Fisher Fine Arts Library, 220 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The science is clear: to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we’ll need aggressive, economy-wide decarbonization in combination with atmospheric carbon removal at the billion-ton scale. These efforts will require unprecedented management of carbon dioxide through strategic technical deployment and infrastructure buildout.
But given the rapid pace and scale of deployment ahead, how can we identify responsible pathways that maximize benefits and minimize harms?
In this talk, Pete Psarras explores challenges and opportunities in carbon management, illustrating how various impact layers from the techno-economic, social, and environmental perspectives interact to form a new picture of deployment.
What role will energy-intensive options like direct air capture play and how will our decision-making today impact that role by mid-century? How does grid electrification and transmission buildout play into technology siting? What are the opportunities for community co-benefits? And alternatively, how do we assess tradeoffs that pit inevitable impacts against one another? Take a journey into the real-world case study of Nevada and its net-zero ambitions to help address these questions and set the stage for a challenging yet critical road ahead.

PSOC Seminar: “Nanotechnologies for Isolating and Characterizing Extracellular Nanocarriers of Cancer Biomarkers" (Hsueh-Chia Chang, University of Notre Dame)
2022-10-10 13:00 - 14:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

Fall 2022 GRASP Seminar: Tomas Pajdla, Czech Technical University, "Solving Minimal Problems in the Age of Machine Learning"
2022-10-10 15:00 - 16:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.

ABSTRACT
I will discuss several our recent advances in understanding minimal problems in computer vision using numerical algebraic geometry tools, i.e., Homotopy continuation and monodromy, as well as machine learning. I will talk about our classification of minimal problems under full and partial visibility and about learning startups for solving hard minimal problems by local methods.

MEAM Seminar: "Materials and Manufacturing Solutions for Sustainable Energy"
2022-10-11 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
In response to the grave and escalating threat of climate change, the US Department of Energy has announced a series of ambitious Energy Earth Shot Initiatives. These target an 80% reduction in the cost of clean hydrogen by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The first of the initiatives focuses on establishing a green hydrogen-powered grid. Hydrogen is expected to play an important role in the creation of a carbon neutral/positive hybrid network for energy production, storage, and distribution. Two key technological challenges are the repurposing of existing infrastructure, such as land-based gas turbines for hydrogen combustion, and accelerating deployment of new infrastructure, including far-offshore wind farms that can generate hydrogen for energy storage and transfer, helping to address energy demand intermittency and decentralization challenges.
As such, there is an urgent need to develop structural and tribological materials with greater resilience to harsh environments including hydrogen-containing fluids at extremes of temperature, which can range from liquid hydrogen (20 K) in cryogenic pumps and pressure vessels to >1500 K in gas turbines. High-entropy alloys (HEAs) and additive manufacturing (AM) methods are two areas of intensive research and a focus of this presentation. Highlights will be presented from ongoing work at Ames National Laboratory, in collaboration with other national laboratory, academic, and industry partners, including the use of AM as a means of processing refractory HEA and other traditionally difficult-to-manufacture alloys. The development and use of rapid mechanical property characterization methods will also be discussed, as well as how these are enabling alloy discovery and process optimization, including for HEAs, which are multi-element alloys that present an extraordinarily challenging departure from traditionally dilute compositions. Additionally, examples of new fundamental insights about structure-property relationships for compositionally and structurally complex systems like HEAs and metallic glasses will be presented.

LRSM Special Lecture: "Pursuing a Scientific Career at a National Laboratory"
2022-10-11 11:00 - 12:00 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
If you are ﬁnishing your PhD or your postdoctoral tenure you may be asking yourself, What’s next? Should I pursue an academic career, as my thesis adviser or postdoctoral supervisor has done? Or should I look elsewhere, perhaps at industry, or government? These are great questions that most of us have asked ourselves at the beginning of our professional life. And while I believe that the university, the private sector, and public service are excellent options to consider, I am here to invite you to add one more possibility – being a scientist at one of the national laboratories, most of which are run by the US Department of Energy.
In this short talk, I will ﬁrst brieﬂy compare a research university with a national laboratory. Then, I will use Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), on Long Island (NY), as an example to describe representative national-laboratory programs on materials science and condensed-matter physics, and the large facilities available for projects, among many others, on quantum materials, catalysis, and materials self-assembly. Finally, I will describe a typical career path at BNL and mention current and future opportunities for staff and postdoctoral positions.
An essential part of this informational seminar is the Questions and Answers period that will follow the talk.

BE Seminar: "Studying the Neural basis of Natural Spatial, Social and Acoustic Behaviors – in Freely Behaving and Flying Bats" (Michael Yartsev, UC Berkeley)
2022-10-11 15:30 - 16:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid seminar that will take place in Glandt Forum (Singh Center) and via Zoom (check email for link and passcode).
Our lab seeks to understand the neural basis of complex spatial, acoustic and social behaviors in mammals. To do so, we take a neuroethological approach that leverages the specialization of the bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus) for these behaviors in order to elucidate their underlying neural computations. In the spatial domain, we take advantage of the bat’s ability to elegantly navigate during high-speed flight and under varying levels of spatial complexities. In the social-acoustic domain, we utilize the bat’s social communication signals to understand how these are learned and later used during natural group social interactions. In parallel, we have pioneered a suite of cutting-edge technologies that make it possible to study the behavior and neural circuits in freely behaving and flying bats to examine these systems in a way not previously possible. In this talk, I provide an overview of some of the research topics our lab has been working on over the past few years.

Climate Justice in Philadelphia: House by house, block by block
2022-10-11 16:00 - 17:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
More details coming soon!
