Penn Engineering Events

Fall 2022 GRASP SFI: Ross Hatton, Oregon State University, "Snakes & Spiders, Robots & Geometry"
2022-10-05 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | 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 Hybrid-Seminar Series
Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST)
Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge
For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu

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!

ASSET Seminar: What Transfers in Transfer Learning?, Eric Wong (University of Pennsylvania)
2022-10-12 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Recently, the transfer learning paradigm has seen a surge of interest due to its impressive capabilities in vision and language. Models are pretrained on ever-growing datasets with enormous parameter counts, trending towards being monolithic and opaque. How can we understand the underlying process? This talk will provide, to some degree, insight on how data affects transfer learning using the framework of influence functions. These findings include pinpointing subpopulations and biases in the pretraining data that help (or hurt) transfer performance.

Impacts of Climate Change on Global Water Resources and Engineering Solutions
2022-10-12 14:00 - 15:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
This panel will examine the impact of climate change on global water resources and how these impacts have affected people in the global south. From droughts that have led to crop failures to floods that have damaged crops and property, it is obvious that climate change has brought extremes in weather and has compromised the availability of clean water to peoples in developing countries where resilience against changing climate are fragile at best. Panelists will offer engineering and hydro ideas that can lead to improvement of the current situation.

Speakers:
Doug Jerolmack, Penn Engineering
Tony Sauder, Penn EES/LPS, Water Center at Penn
Paulo Arratia, Penn Engineering

Fall 2022 GRASP SFI: Sonia Chernova, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Semantic-Driven Robot Assistance and User Interaction”
2022-10-12 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
Reliable operation in everyday human environments – homes, offices, and businesses – remains elusive for today’s robotic systems. A key challenge is diversity, as no two homes or businesses are exactly alike. However, despite the innumerable unique aspects of any home, there are many commonalities as well, particularly about how objects are placed and used. These commonalities can be captured in semantic representations, and then used to improve the autonomy of robotic systems by, for example, enabling robots to infer missing information in human instructions, efficiently search for objects, or manipulate objects more effectively. This talk will discuss recent advances in semantic reasoning, particularly focusing on semantics of everyday objects, household environments, and the development of robotic systems that intelligently interact with users.

CBE Seminar Series: Title TBA (Scott Milner, Pennsylvania State University)
2022-10-12 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

Singh Center for Nanotechnology Annual User Meeting
2022-10-13 | Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The 2022 Singh Center for Nanotechnology Annual User Meeting will be held on Thursday, October 13, 2022, in the Singh Center’s Glandt Forum. The purpose for this in-person meeting is to welcome the user community as we celebrate the acheivements of nanotechnology-enabled research and innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. For more information: http://singhnano.eventbrite.com/

MSE Seminar: “Additive Manufacturing of Compositionally Complex Alloys with Engineered Microstructures”
2022-10-13 10:30 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The increasing demand for structural metals has driven increasingly complex compositions, which bring critical challenges in processing of these materials. Additive manufacturing, also called 3D printing, is a disruptive technology for creating structural materials and components in a single print. In this talk, I will present our recent work on additive manufacturing of compositionally complex alloys (CCAs) with tailored microstructures and properties. Specifically, I will show the potential of leveraging laser additive manufacturing and direct ink writing to produce CCAs such as high-entropy alloys and bulk metallic glass composites with unique microstructures, leading to extraordinary mechanical properties that can extend far beyond those achievable via conventional processing methods. In addition, I will discuss the abundant opportunities enabled by additive manufacturing for high-throughput materials discovery to accelerate the pace of multicomponent alloy design.

Fall 2022 GRASP on Robotics: Victoria Webster-Wood, Carnegie Mellon University, “It’s Alive! Bioinspired and biohybrid approaches towards life-like and living robots”
2022-10-14 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom.
ABSTRACT

Animals have long served as an inspiration for robotics. However, the adaptability, complex control, and advanced learning capabilities observed in animals are not yet fully understood, and therefore have not been fully captured by current robotic systems. Furthermore, many of the mechanical properties and physical capabilities seen in animals have yet to be achieved in robotic platforms. For example, standard materials for robotic fabrication do not exhibit self-healing or have the ability to autonomously generate energy, as is seen in biological systems. Additionally, traditional robotic actuators lack the compliance, energy efficiency, and power-to-weight ratio combinations observed in musculoskeletal systems.
In this talk, I will share efforts from my group in our two primary research thrusts: Bioinspired robotics, and biohybrid robotics. By using neuromechanical models and bioinspired robots as tools for basic research we are developing new models of how animals achieve multifunctional, adaptable behaviors. Building on our understanding of animal systems and living tissues, our research in biohybrid robotics is enabling new approaches toward the creation of autonomous biodegradable living robots. Such robotic systems have future applications in medicine, search and rescue, and environmental monitoring of sensitive environments (e.g., coral reefs).

PICS Colloquium, “Sound Attenuation and the Vibrational Properties of Glasses”
2022-10-14 14:00 - 15:00 | PICS Conference Room 534 – A Wing , 5th Floor, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract: Understanding of the universal low-temperature properties of glasses and why they differ from their crystalline counterparts requires the understanding of the vibrational properties of glasses. Due to recent advances of computational techniques, we are now able to study simulated glasses with a wide range of vibrational properties, which is essential to understanding their role in the low-temperature properties of glasses. In this talk I will discuss the stability dependence of the vibrational modes of glasses ranging from poorly annealed to exceptionally stable. Our most stable glasses are comparable to exceptionally-stable, vapor- deposited laboratory glasses. We find that the density of quasi-localized, low-frequency modes decrease quickly with increasing stability and the density of these modes are correlated with sound attenuation in the harmonic approximation. We use a recently developed theory that very accurately reproduces the low-frequency sound attenuation to examine the relationship between the vibrational modes and sound attenuation. This theory indicates that the non- affine forces, which are responsible for the renormalization of the speed of sound in amorphous solids, is responsible for sound attenuation. Surprisingly, we find that the low- frequency, quasi-localized modes make a relatively small contribution to the sound attenuation coefficient compared to the extended, low-frequency modes. I will conclude by discussing recent attempts at identifying regions of the glass that play an enhanced role in sound attenuation, if they exist.

P.E.S.T.L.E. Orientation - October 14
2022-10-14 16:00 - 16:30 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
Join PESTLE for our Zoom Orientation session on Friday, October 14 at 4:00 pm! Please email us at pestle@seas.upenn.edu if you have any questions.

MEAM Seminar: "Exergy-based Methods as a Promising Modern Thermodynamic Evaluation and Optimization Tool"
2022-10-18 10:00 - 11:30 | Zoom – Email MEAM for Link, peterlit@seas.upenn.edu
Exergy-based methods are powerful tools for developing, evaluating, understanding, and improving energy conversion systems. In addition to conventional methods, advanced exergy-based analyses consider (a) the interactions among components of the overall system, and (b) the real potential for improving each important system component. The main role of an advanced analysis is to provide energy conversion system designers and operators with information useful for improving the design and operation of such systems. This presentation will include the advanced exergy-based evaluations and optimization methods as well. Advanced exergy-based method means splitting the exergy destruction, the capital investment cost, and the component-related environmental impact associated with each single component of an energy conversion system into endogenous/exogenous and avoidable/unavoidable parts and using a further splitting of the exogenous exergy destruction improves (a) our understanding of the processes that take place, and (b) the quality of the conclusions for improvement obtained from the analysis. It will be discussed the main features and some recent developments in the area of advanced exergy-based methods. Application of the method to different energy-conversion systems will be demonstrated.

Joint PSOC/Center for Soft & Living Matter Seminar: “Feeling for cell function” (Jochen Guck, Max Planck Institute)
2022-10-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Fall 2022 Hybrid-Seminar Series
Special joint seminar on Tuesday October 18th at 12:00 Noon
Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge
For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu

CIS Seminar: "Equilibrium Complexity and Deep Learning"
2022-10-18 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Deep Learning has recently made significant progress in learning challenges such as speech and image recognition, automatic translation, and text generation, much of that progress being fueled by the success of gradient descent-based optimization methods in computing local optima of non-convex objectives. From robustifying machine learning models against adversarial attacks to causal inference, training generative models, multi-robot interactions, and learning in strategic environments, many outstanding challenges in Machine Learning lie at its interface with Game Theory. On this front, however, Deep Learning has been less successful. Here, the role of single-objective optimization is played by equilibrium computation, but gradient-descent based methods fail to find equilibria, and even computing local equilibria — the analog of computing local optima in single-agent settings — has remained elusive.

We shed light on these challenges through a combination of learning-theoretic, complexity-theoretic, and game-theoretic techniques, presenting obstacles and opportunities for Machine Learning and Game Theory going forward, including recent progress on multi-agent reinforcement learning.

(I will assume no deep learning, game theory, or complexity theory background for this talk and present results from joint works with Noah Golowich, Stratis Skoulakis, Manolis Zampetakis, and Kaiqing Zhang.)

ASSET Seminar: New approaches to detecting and adapting to domain shifts in machine learning, Zico Kolter, Ph.D. (Carnegie Mellon University)
2022-10-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT:
Machine learning systems, in virtually every deployed system, encounter data from a qualitatively different distribution than what they were trained upon. Effectively dealing with this problem, known as domain shift, is thus perhaps the key challenge in deploying machine learning methods in practice. In this talk, I will motivate some of these challenges in domain shift, and highlight some of our recent work on two topics. First, I will present our work on determining if we can even just evaluate the performance of machine learning models under distribution shift, without access to labelled data. And second, I will present work on how we can better adapt our classifiers to new data distributions, again assuming access only to unlabelled data in the new domain.

Fall 2022 GRASP SFI: Srinath Sridhar, Brown University, “Learning to Generate, Edit, and Arrange 3D Shapes"
2022-10-19 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
In computer vision and robotics, we often need to deal with 3D objects. For instance, we may want to generate instances of 3D chairs, edit the generated chairs using natural language instructions, or arrange them in a canonical orientation. In this talk, I will present some of our work on addressing these problems. First, I will talk about ShapeCrafter, a model for recursively generating and modifying 3D shapes using natural language descriptions. ShapeCrafter generates a 3D shape distribution that gradually evolves as more phrases are added resulting in shapes closer to text instructions. In addition, I will introduce the notions of invariance, equivariance, and ‘canonicalization’, and discuss their importance in 3D understanding. I will describe ConDor, a self-supervised method for canonicalizing the orientation of full and partial 3D shapes. Finally, I will identify future directions including opportunities for expanding 3D understanding to neural fields, articulating objects, and object collections.

CIS Seminar: "Rater Equivalence: An Interpretable Measure of Classifier Accuracy Against Human Labels"
2022-10-20 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
In many classification tasks, the ground truth is either noisy or subjective. Examples of noisy ground truth include: does this radiology image show a cancerous growth? does this radar data portend an imminent tornado? Examples of subjective ground truth include: which of two alternative paper titles is better? is this comment toxic? what is the political leaning of this news article? We refer to tasks where human labels are the only indication of ground truth available at the time that decisions must be made as survey settings. In these settings, measures of classifier accuracy against human labels, such as precision, recall, and cross-entropy, confound the quality of the classifier with the level of agreement among human raters. Thus, they have no meaningful interpretation on their own. We describe a procedure that, given a dataset with predictions from a classifier and K labels per item, rescales any underlying accuracy measure into one that has an intuitive interpretation. The K raters are divided into a source panel and a target panel. The source panel’s labels for an item are combined to produce a predicted label for another rater. Both the source panel predictions and classifier predictions are scored against the same target panel’s labels. The rater equivalence of any classifier is the minimum number of source raters needed to produce the same expected score as that found for the classifier. We explore the stability of the rater equivalence measure as the target panel size varies and find one underlying measure, determinant mutual information, for which it is invariant.

MSE Seminar: “What Governs Grain Boundary Migration?"
2022-10-20 22:30 - 23:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Curvature is the common driving force for grain boundary motion in all polycrystals. However, models and simulations derived from curvature-based motion cannot predict irregular, albeit commonly observed, grain growth behavior. To build better predictive models, we need to employ new tools to understand what governs grain growth. First, I will demonstrate how high energy x-ray diffraction microscopy (HEDM) can be used to observe grain growth in real 3D polycrystalline systems. In a grain growth study employing HEDM of strontium titanate, we find that curvature is a poor predictor of grain boundary migration. Instead, anisotropic grain boundary properties are hypothesized to override the contribution of curvature. Second, I will describe how reinforcement learning, a machine learning tool, can capture the underlying behavior of an evolving Markov decision process and “teach” it to maximize the “rewards” regarding the agreement between prediction and simulation. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we built a deep reinforcement model that emulates grain growth by training on Monte Carlo Potts grain growth simulations. The developed reinforcement model was validated on different microstructural architectures to ensure that it captures the underlying physics. The accuracy of our short and long-term predictions will be evaluated. Then, I will discuss how HEDM and our machine learning model can be combined to understand how anisotropic grain boundaries migrate in 3D polycrystals.

Fall 2022 GRASP on Robotics: Jim Ostrowski, Blue River Technology, "Robotics and Deep Learning in Production Agriculture"
2022-10-21 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance via Zoom.

ABSTRACT
With a growing population to feed, a heightened awareness of the environmental impact of agriculture, and continued challenges of labor availability, the need is greater than ever for advanced technologies applied to automation and autonomy in agriculture. In this talk, I will describe two projects that we have been developing, and discuss the role of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning in delivering commercially viable products. The products include a smart spraying solution called See & Spray Ultimate and an autonomous tractor for tillage. I will explore some of the key focus areas, technological development, and common themes that have allowed us to move these products to production.
