Penn Engineering Events

Fall 2023 GRASP SFI: David Lentink, University of Groningen, "Avian Inspired Design"
2023-09-20 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | 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 on Zoom. This week’s speaker will be virtual.
ABSTRACT
My lab focusses on understanding every aspect of bird flight to improve flying robots—because birds fly further, longer, and more reliable in complex visual and wind environments. I use a multidisciplinary lens that integrates biomechanics, sensorimotor control and organismal & evolutionary biology with aerospace engineering, robotics and aerodynamics to advance our systems understanding of avian flight. The experimental approaches range from flying birds in custom-designed flight arenas, scanning their 3D shape at high-speed and unraveling their musculoskeletal control strategies to making innovative direct aerodynamic force measurements in flight. I will show how these and other ongoing studies in my lab have inspired new biohybrid soft morphing aerial robots that we design and fly in my lab.

CBE Seminar: "Facile Synthesis of Polymeric Nanomaterials via Chemical Vapor Deposition Techniques" (Yang, Cornell)
2023-09-20 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Polymer is often considered one of the most prevalent materials in the modern age. While it has been predominantly synthesized in solution and processed into a variety of macroscopic sizes and shapes, the need for programmability in materials’ microscopic properties has challenged the traditional synthesis approaches. Recent advances in vacuum-based synthesis technologies, such as the initiated Chemical Vapor Deposition (iCVD) and Condensed Droplet Polymerization (CDP), have enabled a new mode of control over material properties during polymerization. Distinct from prior research that has placed a strong emphasis on the design of monomer molecular structure and controlled polymerization, the all-dry synthesis enables manipulation of the molecular interactions, such as molecular complexing and nanoscale dewetting, to achieve programmable nanoscale structures. In this talk, I will use two examples to illustrate the underlying principles and potential benefits of this distinct synthesis paradigm: (i) enabling vapor-phase molecular complexation during polymerization to achieve an unprecedented range of molecular weight, mechanical properties, and film morphology; (ii) leveraging nanoscale dewetting of nonpolar liquids to create polymeric nanodomes with spatiotemporal resolution on the nanoscale. Taken together, these advances in manipulating the physicochemical interactions during polymerization are poised to open up a new dimension in the design and synthesis of programmable polymeric materials, benefiting numerous existing and future technologies, ranging from nano-optics to drug delivery.

MSE Seminar: "DumoLab Research: Regenerative Architecture with Biomaterials" Weitzman School of Design - University of Pennsylvania
2023-09-21 10:30 - 12:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Dr. Mogas-Soldevila will give an overview on her DumoLab research at the Weitzman School of Design at Penn. Her works focuses on regenerative material practices bridging science, engineering, and the arts. DumoLab builds scholarship for materials design critique, and translates biomedical materials used in implants, drug delivery, and tissue scaffolding, into robust materials for use in product and architectural design that nurture both humans and the planet. Interdisciplinary research areas push forward biomaterials science for non-medical applications, growth-like large-scale and ambient conditions manufacturing, and new testing protocols and aesthetics for bio-composites in consumer products and the built environment.

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: "Toward High-performance Simple Models of Legged Locomotion"
2023-09-21 15:00 - 16:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This thesis addresses the challenges of model-based planning and control in legged locomotion, particularly the trade-off between computational speed and robot performance presented by different levels of model complexities. Full-order models, while rich in detail, are often too computationally demanding for real time planning, whereas conventional reduced-order models (ROMs) tend to oversimplify the dynamics, limiting overall performance potential. Our research focuses on a novel approach — the direct optimization of ROMs. This study seeks to enhance the performance of legged robots by automatically discovering the optimal ROMs that simultaneously deliver high robot performance while maintaining the necessary low dimensionality for real time planning applications. In the beginning of the thesis, we focus on a special case where we aim to find whole-body orientation coordinates (WBO) for legged robots that minimize angular momentum errors. This optimal WBO, while being a simple forward kinematic function, serves as a proxy of the real angular momentum and can be applied to complex tasks such as humanoid natural walking. In the second part of the thesis, we formulate a bilevel optimization problem to find optimal ROMs agnostic to controller choices, driven by user-defined objectives and task distributions. The results show substantial improvements in walking speed, ground slope adaptability and torque efficiency on a bipedal robot Cassie. Lastly, we cast the ROM optimization problem as a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) problem to further improve the model performance. This does not only show better performance improvements in experiment but also provides an easier way to implement model optimization and to realize the model performance on the robot.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Pooled tagging of endogenous proteins for exploration of the human proteome driven by prime editing"
2023-09-21 15:00 - 17:00 | Colket Translational Research Building (Room 4040)
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Ophir Shalem are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Henry Sanchez.

Title: Pooled tagging of endogenous proteins for exploration of the human proteome driven by prime editing
Date: September 21, 2023
Time: 3:00pm
Location: Colket Translational Research Building (Room 4040)

The public is welcome to attend.

BE Seminar: "Engineering the cell-matrix interface – understanding and guiding cell function" (Claudia Loebel, University of Michigan)
2023-09-21 15:30 - 16:30 | 216 Moore Building
The native extracellular microenvironment dynamically remodels as cells synthesize, assemble, and remodel their surroundings during tissue development, injury, and repair. In my research group, we use engineered systems to both probe mechanisms of cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions (e.g., mechanobiology) and to guide cell function towards therapeutic behaviors (e.g., tissue repair/regeneration). In this seminar, I will share our recent efforts to visualize and identify the composition of secreted ECM to better understand cellular responses and to design programmable soft materials that harness dynamic cell-ECM interactions.
We have used these systems to reproduce folding morphologies of epithelial tissues (e.g., airway constriction), and to manipulate secreted ECM components as means to better understand the evolution of matrix in organ development (using lung organoids) and repair (using ex vivo lung tissue). Our evolving understanding of matrix dynamics and turnover will not only open up new avenues for understanding biological mechanisms but will also allow us to design better materials systems for therapeutic interventions.

PRECISE Seminar: Designing Computing Systems for Robotics and Physically Embodied Deployments
2023-09-22 10:00 - 11:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

ESE Fall Seminar - "Tools for designing some exciting chips"
2023-09-22 11:00 - 12:00 | Berger Auditorium (Room 13), Skirkanich Hall, 210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
There is an enormous interest in developing customized, domain-specific systems-on-a-chip. Continued improvement in computing efficiency requires functional specialization of hardware designs. But designing complex chips is difficult. This talk presents the Chipyard framework, an integrated SoC design, simulation, and implementation environment for specialized compute systems. Chipyard includes configurable, composable, open-source, generator-based IP blocks that can be used across multiple stages of the hardware development flow while maintaining design intent and integration consistency. We discuss some sample designs, the use of the framework in classes, and opportunities for extension and improvement.

CBE Seminar: "Design of Solid-state Nanomaterials for Electrocatalysis: A Case Study of Oxygen Evolution Reaction Electrocatalysts" (Yang, UIUC)
2023-09-25 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
High-level control of atomic and surface structures is a hallmark of the application of nanomaterials in a range of electrochemical and electrocatalytic devices, such as water electrolyzer. They play critical roles in our effort to develop energy conversion and storage technologies that have net zero carbon impacts. Nanostructured metal oxides made for catalyzing the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is one representative example. Unlike the traditional heterogeneous catalysis, both bulk and surface properties are important in the design of active and durable electrocatalysts. This is because besides the adsorbate evolution mechanism (AEM), lattice oxygen mechanism (LOM) is often involved in the catalytic cycle. In this talk, I will present our recent work on the synthesis-structure-electrocatalytic property relationship of complex oxides that can be described in a generic formula of AxByOz, where A and B can be a single metal cation or mixed cations located at a given lattice site. We haveexamined several archetypes of oxide structures, including perovskite, pyrochlore, spinel, and Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) phasecompounds and their site-mixed solids, all of which are found to be active for OER under either acid or base conditions. Ourresults indicate defect engineering in these solids is particularly important for OER catalysis. Thus, it is essential, besides agood understanding of heterogeneous catalysis, one needs to take a solid state chemistry view in order to uncovering thecatalyst design for optimal performance. How to regulate the cation sites and oxygen defect chemistry for enhancing the bondand lattice stability of key structural constituents can be important. The new understandings should inform the approach tothe fabrication of earth-abundant oxide electrocatalysts for hydrogen production and utilization.

LSRM Presents The Robert Maddin Lecture in Materials Science: "Active & Adaptive Matter Driving Cell Dynamics"
2023-09-25 16:00 - 17:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Control of shape and movement is essential for cell physiology, from cell migration to control of tissue shape. The mechanical behaviors of living cells are controlled by materials constructed by protein-based assemblies within the cell interior. These soft materials both regulate how forces generated by individual mechanoenzymes are transmitted to cell and tissue scales as well as how mechanical properties evolve, or adapt, over time to allow for smooth transitions. I will describe my lab’s recent efforts to understand the design principles of the active, soft materials that drive multi-cellular dynamics. In particular, I will describe our progress to reveal design principles by which the actin cytoskeleton senses, generates, and adapts to mechanical force. Hopefully, I will convince you that the materials within cells provide a rich playground to understand design principles of active and adaptive soft materials.

MEAM Seminar: "Defending the Planet: The DART Mission, and Mechanics Among the Asteroids"
2023-09-26 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
An on-orbit demonstration of asteroid deflection is a key test of our ability to defend the planet from an incoming asteroid. The recent DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission was NASA’s demonstration of kinetic impactor technology, impacting an asteroid to adjust its speed and path. The DART spacecraft impacted the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, and was the first-ever space mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by a kinetic impactor. We discuss the mission, and the critical role that mechanics plays in such planetary defense missions.
Most asteroids are “small” rocky bodies (they can vary in size from sub-m to several hundred km). The structure and surface topography of asteroids are determined by impact and fracture processes that occur over an immense range of timescales. Recent observations have demonstrated that many small asteroids are “rubble-piles,” collections of rocks held together by gravity. What determines this structure? We examine the disruption and breakdown of asteroids by studying the multiscale mechanics of dynamic fracture and fragmentation, coupled with computational simulations of gravitational re-accumulation. The critical mechanisms are addressed through fundamental high-strain-rate experiments, high-speed visualization, theoretical and computational modeling of failure processes, and computational simulations of asteroid damage and disruption. Our focus is on the relative roles of impact and thermal loading on the nature of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) that may potentially impact the Earth.

ESE Fall Seminar - "Large Observational Study of the Causal Effects of a Nudge and the Geometry of Causality"
2023-09-26 11:00 - 12:00 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Nudges are interventions promoting healthy behavior without forbidding options or significant incentives. As an example of a nudge, the Apple Watch encourages users to stand by delivering a notification if they have been sitting for the first 50 minutes of an hour.
Based on 76 billion minutes of observational standing data from 160,000 subjects in the public Apple Heart and Movement Study, amount of data in the field that makes this work one of the largest ever in the subject, we estimate the causal effect of this notification using a novel regression discontinuity design for time-series data with time-varying treatment. We show that the nudge increases the probability of standing by up to 44%, a very significant effect compared to what has been reported in the literature, remaining effective with time, even after almost 2 years. The nudge’s effectiveness increases with age, and it is independent of gender. Closing Apple Watch Activity Rings, a visualization of participants’ daily progress in Move, Exercise, and Stand, further increases the nudge’s impact. We conclude the presentation with some recent work on connections between geometry and causal inference.
The first part of the presentation is joint work with Achille Nazaret while the second is with Amir Farzam and Allen Tannenbaum.

ESE PhD Thesis Defense: "Control of Multi-Contact Systems via Local Hybrid Models"
2023-09-26 13:00 - 15:00 | Room 35, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
For many important tasks such as manipulation and locomotion, robots need to make and break contact with their environment. Although such multi-contact systems are common, they pose a significant challenge when it comes to analysis and control. This thesis exploits the local hybrid structure of such problems and presents scalable and fast algorithmic solutions. First, we present an MPC framework for multi-contact systems. The method is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and is capable of high-speed reasoning over potential contact events. Then, we focus on utilizing tactile measurements for reactive control, which is very natural yet underexplored in the robotics community. We propose a control framework to design provably stabilizing tactile feedback policies by exploiting the local complementarity structure of contact dynamics. Lastly, inspired by the connection between rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation functions and linear complementarity problems, we present a method to analyze stability of multi-contact systems in feedback with ReLU network controllers.

Fall 2023 GRASP Seminar: Paul Debevec, Eyeline Studios Powered by Netflix, “From Virtual Cinematographhy to Virtual Production”
2023-09-26 14:00 - 15:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
*This seminar will be held in-person in Levine 307 as well as virtually via Zoom. The seminar will NOT be recorded.
ABSTRACT
This talk will describe how virtual cinematography techniques developed at UC Berkeley for image-based modeling, rendering, and lighting helped enable iconic visual effects sequences in movies such as The Matrix, X-Men, Spider-Man 2, Benjamin Button, and Avatar. It will also show how real-world image-based lighting techniques which surround actors with computer-controlled LED’s have led to new virtual production techniques seen in The Social Network, Gravity, Rogue One, Asura, and The Mandalorian. The talk will conclude by describing new research to improve the lighting reproduction, color rendition, and alpha compositing capabilities of these new virtual production stages.

ASSET Seminar: "Safety through Agility - Safe and Performant Control for Learning-Enabled Autonomous Systems" (Mangharam, Penn)
2023-09-27 12:00 - 13:15 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT:
We present three approaches to combine formal methods, control theory, and machine learning for safe and performant autonomous systems.

Safe control for learning-enabled systems: We present our recent progress on how to learn safe adaptive behavior for highly interactive multi-agent systems. We will introduce how to quantify the uncertainty of closed-loop control systems using a frequentist method called conformal prediction and incorporate the uncertainty for safe perception-based control.
Learning Introspective Control: Oftentimes the systems that we control operate under different conditions due to changing environments, varying system parameters or changes in payload. As such, we strive to develop computationally efficient, data-driven system models that allow predictive controllers to adapt to changes in the environment in real-time. We focus on using Gaussian Processes as models to study the problem in the context of driving on surfaces with changing friction coefficients.
Differentiable Predictive Control: Finally, we discuss the application of differentiable predictive control for large-scale urban road networks.

Fall 2023 GRASP SFI: Robert Baines, ETH Zürich, "Material system design for predictable shape-morphing robots"
2023-09-27 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 on Zoom. This week’s speaker will be virtual.
ABSTRACT
Robots are traditionally designed with immutable physical hardware and control policies that make them specialized for repetitive, structured tasks and environments. This talk presents work toward robots that actively change shape to accomplish a variety of tasks in diverse environments. Shape-changing robots are pursued at two levels. First, I will discuss the design and modeling of shape-morphing components, including variable stiffness materials and variable-trajectory soft actuators. Component-level analysis leads to insight into how actively tunable stiffness differentials can yield myriad deformations. Inverse models that recapitulate shape-morphing components’ highly nonlinear geometric and material behavior allow for systematic mechanical programming of shape-morphing robotic function. These foundational studies inform the second part of the talk, in which I will discuss how shape-morphing components are applied to create an adaptive amphibious quadruped robot. Harnessing active stiffness-tuning materials, the robot features limbs that switch between programmed shapes for effective propulsion in multiple environments. The robot testifies to the efficacy of “adaptive morphogenesis,” a design strategy that leverages shape-morphing and gait adaptability to improve performance across multiple environments.

MSE David P. Pope Distinguished Lecture: "Light, Materials and Interfaces: The Complex Dance That Allows CLIP-based 3D Printing," Stanford University
2023-09-28 11:00 - 12:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract
The production of polymer products relies largely on age-old molding techniques. A major reason for this is that additive methods have not delivered meaningful alternatives to traditional processes—until now. In this talk, I will describe Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) technology, which embodies a convergence of advances in software, hardware, and materials to bring the digital revolution to polymer additive manufacturing. CLIP uses software-controlled chemistry to produce commercial quality parts rapidly and at scale by capitalizing on the principle of oxygen-inhibited photopolymerization to generate a continual liquid interface of uncured resin between a forming part and a printer’s exposure window. Instead of printing layer-by-layer, this allows layerless parts to ‘grow’ from a pool of resin, formed by light. Compatible with a wide range of polymers, CLIP opens major opportunities for innovative products across diverse industries. Previously unmakeable products are already manufactured at scale with CLIP, including the large-scale production of running shoes by Adidas (Futurecraft 4D); mass-customized football helmets by Riddell; the world’s first FDA-approved 3D printed dentures; and numerous parts in automotive, consumer electronics, and medicine. At Stanford, we are pursuing new advances including digital therapeutic devices in pediatric medicine, new multi-materials printing approaches, recyclable materials, and the design of a high-resolution printer to advance technologies in the microelectronics and drug/vaccine delivery areas, including novel microneedle designs as a potent vaccine delivery platform.

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "A Study of Hydrogel Mechanics with Application on the Fracture of Human Blood Clots"
2023-09-29 10:00 - 11:00 | DRLB A6, 209 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Loading of biological and synthetic hydrogels involves large deformations, and there exists a large literature devoted to their experimental characterization. Analytical investigations have recognized the importance of contributions originating from the liquid phase, and experiments have verified them. The liquid flux fields in these materials usually exhibit fully three-dimensional profiles and are time-dependent. This coupled mechanical-diffusional poroelastic problem is studied here within the framework of continuum poro-elasticity and presents an abundance of interesting phenomena. One such interesting observation in many experiments is the tendency of some hydrogel materials to expel liquid under tension. This behavior is well-documented in biologically swollen tissues, but it appears to be absent from a majority of synthetic hydrogels which exhibit the more common behavior of absorbing liquid under tension. In this thesis the poro-elastic fracture of hydrogel materials is studied and the energy release rate, a fundamental quantity of fracture mechanics, is computed. Liquid flow is shown to contribute significantly to fracture, and it can be utilized to design tough hydrogels.
Beyond the theoretical investigations, continuum poroelasticity is applied to the fracture behavior of human blood clots whose main component is a fibrin gel. Fibrin is a blood clotting protein and the main structural components of clots and thrombi. Different fibrin(ogen) concentrations, types of loading (tension and shear), and geometries are used to study the dependencies of the toughness on the fibrin(ogen), showing that fracture toughness increases with fibrin(ogen) concentration. The poroelastic constitutive model used, incorporating the intricate fibrin fiber mechanics, captures well the experimental data. Insights for the microstructural process happening during fracture are provided through a combination of finite element results and microscopy imaging.

PRECISE Seminar: Network Intelligence Role in Future Mobility
2023-09-29 10:00 - 11:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

Fall 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Stefano Soatto, AWS & UCLA, "Toward Foundational Models of Physical Scenes: From Large Language Models to World Models and Back"
2023-09-29 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 on Zoom.
ABSTRACT
Now that a significant fraction of human knowledge has been shared through the Internet, scraped and squashed into the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs), do we still need embodiment and interaction with the physical world to build representations? Is there a dichotomy between LLMs and “large world models”? What is the role of visual perception in learning such models? Can perceptual agents trained by passive observation learn world models suitable for control?
To begin tackling these questions, I will first address the issue of controllability of LLMs. LLMs are stochastic dynamical systems, for which the notion of controllability is well established: The state (“of mind”) of an LLM can be trivially steered by a suitable choice of input given enough time and memory. However, the space of interest for control of an LLM is not that of words, but that of “meanings” expressible as sentences that a human could have spoken and would understand. Unfortunately, unlike controllability, the notions of meaning and understanding are not usually formalized in a way that is relatable to LLMs in use today.
I will propose a simplistic definition of meaning that reflects the functional characteristics of a trained LLM. I will show that a well-trained LLM establishes a topology in the space of meanings, represented by equivalence classes of trajectories of underlying dynamical model (LLM). Then, I will describe both necessary and sufficient conditions for controllability in such a space of meanings.
I will then highlight the relation between meanings induced by a trained LLM upon the set of sentences that could be uttered, and “physical scenes” underlying sets of images that could be observed. In particular, a physical scene can be defined uniquely and inferred as an abstract concept without the need for embodiment, a view aligned with J. Koenderink’s characterization of images as “controlled hallucinations.”
Lastly, I will show that popular models ostensibly used to represent the 3D scene (Neural Radiance Fields, or NeRFs) can at most represent the images on which they are trained, but not the underlying physical scene. However, composing a NeRF with a Latent Diffusion Model or other inductively-trained generative model yields a viable representation of the physical scene. Such a model class, which can be learned through passive observations, is a first albeit rudimentary Foundational Model of physical scenes in the sense of being sufficient for any downstream inference task based on visual data.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Reproducible, generalizable, and scalable analytic software for large neuroimaging datasets" (Chenying Zhao)
2023-10-02 14:00 - 16:00 | Class of 62 Auditorium, John Morgan Building, 3620 Hamilton Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Theodore D. Satterthwaite are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Chenying Zhao.

Title: Reproducible, generalizable, and scalable analytic software for large neuroimaging datasets

Date: October 2nd, Monday
Time: 2:00pm
Location: John Morgan Building (3620 Hamilton Walk) – The Class of 1962 Auditorium.

Virtual option:
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96808017662?pwd=[REDACTED]
* Meeting ID: 968 0801 7662
* Passcode: [REDACTED]

The public is welcome to attend.

ESE Fall Seminar - "Agile Design of Domain-Specific Accelerators and Compilers"
2023-10-03 13:00 - 14:00 | Zoom – Meeting ID 990 7434 6805
With the slowing of Moore’s law, computer architects have turned to domain-specific hardware accelerators to improve the performance and efficiency of computing systems. However, programming these systems entails significant modifications to the software stack to properly leverage the specialized hardware. Moreover, the accelerators become obsolete quickly as the applications evolve. What is needed is a structured approach for generating programmable accelerators and for updating the software compiler as the accelerator architecture evolves with the applications. In this talk, I will describe a new agile methodology for co-designing programmable hardware accelerators and compilers. Our methodology employs a combination of new programming languages and formal methods to automatically generate the accelerator hardware and its compiler from a single specification. This enables faster evolution and optimization of accelerators, because of the availability of a working compiler. I will showcase this methodology using Amber, a coarse-grained programmable accelerator for imaging and machine learning (ML) we designed and fabricated using our flow in TSMC 16 nm technology. I will show how we agilely evolved Amber into Onyx, our next generation accelerator, using an application-driven design space exploration framework called APEX enabled by our hardware-compiler co-design flow.

ASSET Seminar: "Getting Computers to Do What We Want: Programming Meets Machine Learning" (Michael Littman, Brown University)
2023-10-04 12:00 - 13:15 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT:
It is immensely empowering to delegate information processing and automation work to machines and have them carry out difficult tasks on our behalf. But programming computers is hard. The traditional approach to this problem is to try to fix people: They should work harder to learn to code. In this talk, I argue that a promising alternative is to meet people partway. Specifically, powerful new approaches to machine learning provide ways to infer intent from disparate signals and, with your help, could help make it easier for everyone to get computational help with their vexing problems.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Leveraging Modeling and Remodeling based Bone Formation in Cyclic Administration of Anabolic Agents for Osteoporosis Treatment" (Tala Azar)
2023-10-04 13:00 - 15:00 | JMB Reunion Auditorium, 3620 Hamilton Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. X. Sherry Liu are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Tala Azar.

Title: Leveraging Modeling and Remodeling based Bone Formation in Cyclic Administration of Anabolic Agents for Osteoporosis Treatment

Date: October 4, 2023
Time: 1:00 PM EST
Location: John Morgan Reunion Auditorium.

Zoom option available:
https://upenn.zoom.us/j/93038930691?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 930 3893 0691
Passcode: [REDACTED]

The public is welcome to attend.

Fall 2023 GRASP SFI: Andy Zeng, Google DeepMind, "From words to actions"
2023-10-04 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 on Zoom.
ABSTRACT
The rise of recent Foundation models (and applications e.g. ChatGPT) offer an exciting glimpse into the capabilities of large deep networks trained on Internet-scale data. They hint at a possible blueprint for building generalist robot brains that can do anything, anywhere, for anyone. Nevertheless, robot data is expensive – and until we can bring robots out into the world (already) doing useful things in unstructured places, it will be challenging to match the same amount of diverse data being used to train e.g. large language models today. In this talk, I will briefly discuss some of the lessons we’ve learned while scaling real robot data collection, how we’ve been thinking about Foundation models, and how we might bootstrap off of them (and modularity) to make our robots useful sooner.

CBE Seminar: "Statistical Teleodynamics: A Unified Theory of Emergent Arbitrage Equilibrium Phenomena in Active and Passive Matter" (Venkatasubramanian, Columbia University)
2023-10-04 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The physics of active matter, such as bacterial colonies and bird flocks, exhibiting interesting self-organizing dynamical behavior has gained considerable importance in recent years. Recent theoretical advances use techniques from hydrodynamics, kinetic theory, and non-equilibrium statistical physics. However, for biological agents, these don’t seem to recognize explicitly their critical feature, namely, the role of survival-driven purpose and the attendant pursuit of maximum utility. In this talk, I will present a novel game-theoretic framework, statistical teleodynamics, that accounts for this feature explicitly and shows how it can be integrated with conventional statistical mechanics to develop a unified theory of arbitrage equilibrium in active and passive matter.
The theory proposes a spectrum of self-actualizing capabilities, going from none to completely strategic decision-making, and envisions the various examples of active matter systems occupying someplace in this spectrum. I will show how statistical teleodynamics reduces to familiar results in statistical mechanics in the limit of zero self-actualization. At the other extreme, in an economic setting, it provides novel insights into the emergence of income distributions and their fairness in an ideal free-market society. As examples of agents in between these limits, I will discuss how the theory predicts pattern formation in mussel beds, the emergence of ant craters, and the flocking of birds.

MSE Seminar: "Nanomaterials Enable Delivery of Genetic Material Without Transgene Integration in Mature Plants" University of California - Berkeley
2023-10-05 10:30 - 12:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Genetic engineering of plants is at the core of sustainability efforts, natural product synthesis, and agricultural crop engineering. The plant cell wall is a barrier that limits the ease and throughput with which exogenous biomolecules can be delivered to plants. Current delivery methods either suffer from host range limitations, low transformation efficiencies, tissue regenerability, tissue damage, or unavoidable DNA integration into the host genome. Here, we demonstrate efficient diffusion-based biomolecule delivery into tissues and organs of intact plants of several species with a suite of pristine and chemically-functionalized high aspect ratio nanomaterials [1]. Efficient DNA delivery and strong protein expression without transgene integration is accomplished in mature Nicotiana benthamiana, Eruca sativa (arugula), Triticum aestivum (wheat) and Gossypium hirsutum (cotton) leaves and arugula protoplasts [2]. Notably, we demonstrate that transgene expression is transient and devoid of transgene integration into the plant host genome, of potential utility for easing regulatory oversight of transformed crops as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) [3, 4]. We also demonstrate a nanoparticle-based strategy in which small interfering RNA (siRNA) is delivered to mature Nicotiana benthamiana leaves and effectively silence a gene with 95% efficiency. We find that nanomaterials both facilitate biomolecule transport into plant cells, while also protecting polynucleotides such as RNA from nuclease degradation. DNA origami and nanostructures and gold nanoparticles further enable siRNA delivery to plants [5], which we use to elucidate force-independent transport phenomena of nanoparticles to the plant cell wall [6, 7]. Lastly, we demonstrate protein delivery with newly-discovered peptide-based nanoparticles towards DNA-free genome editing. Our work provides a tool for species-independent, targeted, and passive delivery of genetic material, without transgene integration, into plant cells for diverse plant biotechnology applications.
1. Demirer, G.S., Zhang, H., Goh, N.S., Grandio, E.G., Landry, M.P. Carbon nanotube-mediated DNA delivery without transgene integration in intact plants. Nature Protocols (2019)
2. Demirer, G.S., Zhang, H., Matos, J., Goh, N., Cunningham, F.J., Sung, Y., Chang, R., Aditham, A.J., , Chio, L., Cho, M.J., Staskawicz, B., Landry, M.P. High Aspect Ratio Nanomaterials Enable Delivery of Functional Genetic Material Without DNA Integration in Mature Plants. Nature Nanotechnology (2019)
3. Landry, M.P.‡, Mitter, N.‡ How nanocarriers delivering cargoes in plants can change the GMO landscape. Nature Nanotechnology (2019)
4. Demirer, G.S.‡, Silva, T.N., Jackson, C.T., Thomas, J.B., Ehrhardt, D., Rhee, S.Y.‡, Mortimer, J.C.‡, Landry, M.P.‡ Nanotechnology to advance CRISPR/Cas genetic engineering of plants. Nature Nanotechnology (2021)
5. Zhang, H., Zhang, H., Demirer, G.S., Gonzales-Grandio, E., Fan, C., Landry, M.P.‡ Engineering DNA nanostructures for siRNA delivery in plants. Nature Protocols (2020)
6. Zhang, H.*, Demirer, G.S.*, Zhang, H., Ye, T., Goh, N.S., Aditham, A.J., Cunningham, F.J., Fan, C., Landry, M.P. Low-dimensional DNA Nanostructures Coordinate Gene Silencing in Mature Plants. PNAS (2019)
7. Zhang, H.*, Goh, N.S.*, Wang, J., Demirer, G.S., Butrus, S., Park, S-J, Landry, M.P.‡ Nanoparticle Cellular Internalization is Not Required for RNA Delivery to Mature Plant Leaves. Nature Nanotechnology (2021)

BE Seminar: "Synthetic mucins: from new chemical routes to engineered cells" (Jessica R. Kramer, University of Utah)
2023-10-05 15:30 - 16:30 | 216 Moore Building
Mucus is essential for life and serves as a barrier to hydrate, lubricate, and protect tissues. Mucin glycoproteins are the major component of mucus. There are 20+ mucin genes with variable expression patterns, splicing, and post-translational glycosylation that result in structures with discrete biochemical functions. Mucins play roles in infection, immunity, inflammation and cancer. Such diversity has challenged study of structure-function relationships. The Kramer lab is developing scalable methods, based on polymerization of amino acid N-carboxyanhydrides, to synthesize glycoproteins that capture the chemical and physical properties of native mucins. We are utilizing these synthetic mucins to engineer the glycocalyx of live cells to shed light on the role of glycans in health and disease. Areas of focus for our lab are progression of epithelial cancers, and pathogen infection processes.

ASSET/IBI Symposium on Trustworthy AI for Health Care
2023-10-06 08:00 - 18:00 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Organizers: Rajeev Alur (Penn Engineering), John Holmes (PSOM), Insup Lee (Penn Engineering), Qi Long (PSOM), Marylyn Richie (PSOM)
Event Description: Artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to revolutionize nearly every field, sifting through massive amounts of data to find insights that humans would miss, making faster and more accurate decisions and predictions as a result. Applying those insights to healthcare could yield life-saving benefits. Given the stakes, however, understanding exactly how these technologies arrive at their conclusions and having assurance guarantees, is critical for adoption in the practice of medicine. The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers in artificial intelligence, biomedical informatics, machine learning, and clinical practitioners to develop trustworthy AI technology for health care applications. This day-long symposium is co-organized by ASSET, a new Penn Engineering center on Trustworthy AI and IBI, Institute for Biomedical Informatics, housed in Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM). The program will consist of a keynote by Prof. Tina Hernandez-Boussard of Stanford University, talks by Penn faculty on collaborative research in trustworthy AI for health care (see list of projects here), students’ posters, and a panel.

Agenda:
8:00 AM: Breakfast and registration
8:30 AM: Welcome by Jonathan Epstein, Executive Vice Dean and Chief Scientific Officer, Perelman School of Medicine and David Meaney, Senior Associate Dean, Penn Engineering
8:40 AM: Introduction to research at Penn in Trustworthy AI for healthcare: Rajeev Alur (Director, ASSET) and Marylyn Ritchie (Director, IBI)
9:10 AM: Keynote: “Creating and Evaluating Ethical AI for Health Decisions” Professor Tina Hernandez-Boussard, Stanford University
10:00 AM: Coffee break
10:20 AM: SEAS/PSOM Collaborative Research Presentations I; Chair: Insup Lee
10:20 AM: “Combining Domain Knowledge and Data-Driven AI for Building Healthcare Applications with Scallop” Mayur Naik
10:45 AM: “Utilizing Deep Learning to Diagnose Glaucoma from Fundus Photography in African Ancestry Individuals” Osbert Bastani, Rebecca Salowe, and Joan O’Brien
11:10 AM: “Personalized medicine for hypertensive pregnancy disorders” Paris Pedikaris, Walter Witschey, and Nadav Schwartz
11:35 AM: Lightning talks on poster presentations
12:15 PM: Lunch and posters
1:45 PM: SEAS/PSOM Collaborative Research Presentations II; Chair: Qi Long
1:45 PM: “Multimodal explainable AI for prognostic stratification of glioblastoma patients” MacLean Nasrallah, Bhakti Baheti, and Sunny Rai
2:10 PM: “Optimizing clinical monitoring for delivery room resuscitation using novel interpretable AI” Elizabeth Foglia and Kieran Murphy
2:35 PM: “Calibrated machine learning methods for mobile health intervention” Ian Barnett, Edgar Dobriban, and Pratik Chaudhari
3:00 PM: “Trustworthy explainable AI to revolutionize breast cancer risk assessment with digital breast tomosynthesis” Despina Kontos and Lyle Ungar
3:25 PM: Coffee break
3:45 PM: Panel on “Transitioning Research into Practice”, Chair: John Holmes
Allison Dennis; Program Officer, NIH
Bill Hanson; Chief Medical Information Officer, UPHS
Jennifer Roberts; Director, Resilient Systems, ARPA-H
Srinivas Sridhara; Chief Data and Analytics Officer, UPHS
Goli Yamini; Associate Program Director, NSF
Zoom for Panel: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96075553356
5:00 PM: Reception
6:00 PM: Symposium concludes
Registration:
The registration is free and open to all members of the Penn community. Fill out the form to register. Please note that space is limited, and we encourage you to register ASAP. Deadline to register is Friday, September 22nd.
Poster Submissions:
We welcome junior researchers at Penn (i.e. doctoral and postdoctoral students, trainees, junior faculty) to present their work related to the workshop theme during the poster session. Fill out the form to submit a poster by Friday, September 15th. Please note that we can accommodate only a fixed number of posters, and we will notify the authors of accepted posters by Friday, September 22nd.

MSE PhD Defense: "Highly Controlled Transition Metal and Transition Metal Oxide Nanocrystals for Enhanced Catalytic and Magnetic Properties" Daniel Rosen
2023-10-06 09:00 - 11:30 | LRSM Reading Room, 3231 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This work presents the precise synthesis, characterization, and property analysis of transition metal and transition metal oxide nanocrystals (NCs). Specifically, the interface between catalytic and magnetic properties is explored using precisely defined NCs. The methods of NC synthesis and characterizations are discussed including an in-depth discussion of Extended X-ray Absorption Fins Structure (EXAFS) based nanothermometry methods developed in this work. The ability to control the atomic structure of NCs is discussed in the context of rapidly induced intermetallic phase transitions for the electrochemical Oxygen Reduction Reaction (ORR). We discuss the use of these precisely designed NCs for their use in thermal catalysis in the presence of an induction field to show how the magnetic properties of NCs can enhance the catalytic properties specifically CO Oxidation and Cinnamaldehyde Hydrogenation. The discussion of nanothermometry is extended as an in-operando technique to better describe the magnetic effects of inductively enhanced CO Oxidation in flow. In the final chapter, the precise synthesis of NCs is explored in order to generate both novel materials as well as materials synthesized through non solvothermal methods. The generation of core-shell materials in the context of ORR and the electrochemical Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) are discussed. These core-shell materials show great potential for magnetically enhanced catalysis, and this possibility is discussed as a possible future work.
