Penn Engineering Events

BE Seminar: "Building Tissues: Engineering Complexity Through Biomaterial Design" (Brendan Harley, University of Illinois)
2023-03-02 15:30 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Advances in the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine require biomaterials that instruct, rather than simply permit, a desired cellular response. A major challenge to progress in our field is the complex organization of the tissues in our bodies, which are hierarchical, vary in space and time, and can differ person-to person. Prof. Harley’s research program is developing approaches to structurally and biomolecularly pattern biomaterials to enable tissue regeneration after injury as well as to study processes linked to homeostasis and disease progression outside of the body. A major area of our work targets development of a degradable biomaterial to regenerate craniomaxillofacial bones and musculoskeletal insertions. We are using bioinspired design motifs to create composite materials that instruct desired cell activities while retaining mechanical competence required for clinical translation. I will describe (granular) hydrogel models to study niche regulation of hematopoietic stem cells and patient-derived glioblastoma specimens. These tools enable study of dynamic processes such as niche remodeling and reciprocal signaling linked to stem cell quiescence as well as the role of angiocrine signals and immune interactions on invasive spreading and drug resistance in primary brain cancer. We are adapting these approaches to develop hierarchical models of the endometrial tissue microenvironment to investigate trophoblast invasion and endometrial pathologies.

CNT/PHT Seminar: "The Future of Brain Interfacing" (Philip Sabes, Neuralink, UCSF)
2023-03-02 13:00 - 14:00 | Rubenstein Audtorium, Smilow Center for Translational Research
“The Future of Brain Interfacing”
Brain interfacing holds immense promise, both for restoring lost sensory, motor or cognitive function and for the treatment of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. The promise is driving a great deal of interest in brain interfacing technologies — from researchers, industry, investors, and the public — yet the clinical impact of these technologies is still limited. I’ll present my view of present state of brain interfacing and the key challenges and opportunities, as seen through the lens of my earlier research at UCSF and my more recent work in the startup world.

Co-hosted by the Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics (CNT) and Penn Health-Tech (PHT): contact littlab@seas.upenn.edu with any questions.

RSVP here

ESE Spring Seminar - "Scalable Data-Driven Decision-Making for Smart Autonomous Power and Energy Systems"
2023-03-02 12:30 - 13:30 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Rapidly growing renewable generations and peak loads pose a serious threat to the security and reliability of modern power and energy systems. A critical question is “how to accommodate a high penetration of renewable generation and deep electrification?”. This talk focuses on two key challenges, i.e., unknown information and the scalability issue of coordinating large-scale distributed energy resources. I will present two examples of developing distributed algorithms and learning-assisted control methods to address these challenges. One example is distributed model-free optimal voltage control to handle unknown physical system models, and the other is online learning and human-in-the-loop decision-making for residential demand response to deal with unknown human user behaviors.

MSE Seminar: "Fundamental Understanding of Mechanical Properties and Deformation Mechanisms of Emerging Complex Alloys Serving under Extreme Conditions" (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
2023-03-02 10:30 - 23:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
The development of stronger and tougher materials serving under extreme conditions is a long-term goal of materials research that has been made even more urgent recently by our quests for space exploration and energy sustainability. Recently, the advent of alloys with increased complexity, e.g., multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs), additively manufactured (AM) alloys, and alloys with hierarchical microstructures, has brought forth vast opportunities for the discovery and design of new materials with unprecedented mechanical properties that can meet the engineering requirements for these applications. This seminar navigates the scientific frontiers of emerging complex alloys through a wide range of temperatures: 1. The excellent combination of strength and toughness for CrCoNi-based FCC MPEAs at cryogenic or room emperatures; 2. The loss of strength for CrCoNi-based FCC MPEAs at intermediate temperatures and its remedies using additive manufacturing and oxide dispersion strengthening; and 3. The prospects and limitations of high-temperature, high-strength BCC refractory MPEAs and BCC/B2 refractory high-entropy superalloys. These fundamental investigations demonstrate how the combination of dedicated mechanical testing, state-of-the-art characterization, and multiscale computer simulations can advance the understanding and development of these highly complex alloys.

MEAM Seminar: "Control of Jump Stochastic Systems by Learning Recurrent Spatiotemporal Patterns"
2023-03-02 10:00 - 11:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Efficient learning for stochastic control and estimation remains a topic of high interest in a variety of disciplines and there are well-known advantages and disadvantages to both model-free and model-based learning. On one hand, it is becoming increasingly more feasible to rely entirely on model-free/data-driven methods for controlling complex stochastic systems, but a well-known issue with these methods is the inefficiency of their data consumption and computation time. On the other hand, most model-based control methods are designed for a very simple class of stochastic systems, e.g., Gaussian white noise systems. In this talk, our aim is to leverage the abundance of tools and theory from mathematics on various stochastic processes to expand the capabilities of model-based methods so that model-free methods don’t need to be implemented end-to-end. We demonstrate this with the broad class of jump stochastic systems (JSSs), i.e., systems with random and repetitive jump phenomena, which are an excellent case study due to the plentiful theory that exists on various jump processes and because JSSs are highly prevalent in diverse real-world applications. The core part of this talk will focus on the development of a controller architecture called “pattern-learning for prediction” (PLP) for discrete-time/discrete-event systems (e.g., Markovian jump systems), in which we take advantage of the fact that the driving stochastic process is a sequence of random variables that occurs as repeated “patterns of interest”. We then present explicit implementations of the PLP controller architecture to two real-world applications: 1) the control of networks with dynamic topology (e.g., fault-tolerant control of a power grid susceptible to line failures), for which PLP is integrated with variations of the novel system level synthesis framework for disturbance-rejection; 2) the congestion control of vehicle traffic flow over metropolitan networks of signalized intersections, for which PLP is extended to a version called “pattern learning with memory and prediction” via the integration of episodic control to reduce memory consumption.

CBE Seminar Series: "Decisions through Oscillation: Learning from Endothelial Cells" (Andre Levchenko, Yale University)
2023-03-01 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Blood vessels constitute one of the most complex and most essential biological systems, sometimes referred to as a separate organ. Endothelial cells, lining blood vessels are also one of the most ‘plastic’ cell types, capable of a wide range of responses to external stimuli, conditioned on their internal states and micro-environment. Strikingly, many of these responses are triggered by the same signal, the growth factor VEGF. Understanding how the same input can trigger a variety of cellular responses in a consistent and meaningful manner has been one of the key challenges of systems biology. In this talk, based on a series of recent studies at our lab, I will share the lessons we learned about encoding and decoding of the information in cellular signaling networks more generally and in endothelial cells more specifically. In particular, I will discuss the ubiquitous presence and importance of dynamically fluctuating biochemical signaling in these and other cellular networks controlling different response time scales and outcomes.
Bio:
Andre Levchenko is a John C. Malone Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University and the Director of Yale Systems Biology Institute. He graduated from Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology with MS and from Columbia University with the doctoral degrees. He completed his postdoctoral studies at Caltech, working in genetics and computer science. Thereafter, he spent 12 years on faculty of Johns Hopkins University BME department, rising through the ranks to Full Professor. In 2013, he was recruited to Yale as a founding director of the new systems biology institute. Prof. Levchenko has made foundational contributions to systems biology of cellular signaling, analysis of cell migration and development of novel micro- and nano-fabricated platforms for assaying cellular functions. He is a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, American Physical Society, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and an elected member of Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

Spring 2023 GRASP SFI: Edward Hu, University of Pennsylvania, “Focusing on Task-Relevant Information in RL for Robots”
2023-03-01 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. This week’s presenter will be in-person as well.
ABSTRACT
While it is tempting to view robotics as a nail that can be solved with the deep learning hammer, we have seen that deep-learning based perception and action pipelines for robots are notoriously brittle and data hungry. In this talk, I advocate for a more measured approach for designing data-driven controllers by focusing learning on task-relevant portions of the MDP. Through this philosophy, I show that we can acquire capable learning systems that can transfer between morphologically distinct robots, intelligently probe the environment for imperceptible reward signals, and perform deep exploration with no priors.

ASSET Seminar: Statistical and Machine Learning for Electronic Health Records: Challenges and Opportunities, Qi Long (University of Pennsylvania)
2023-03-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
ABSTRACT:
Electronic health records (EHRs) offer great promises in advancing clinical research and transforming learning health systems. However, complex, temporal EHRs are fraught with biases and present daunting analytical challenges that, if not addressed, can exacerbate health inequities. EHRs data, recorded at irregular time intervals with varying frequencies, are multi-modal and multi-scale including structured data such as labs and vitals, codified data such as diagnosis and procedure codes, and unstructured data such as doctor notes and pathology reports. They are typically incomplete and contain various data errors. What’s more, data gaps and errors in EHRs are often unequally distributed across patient groups: People with less access to care, often people of color or with lower socioeconomic status, tend to have more incomplete EHRs. In this talk, I will discuss these challenges and share my research group’s recent work on developing robust statistical and machine learning methods for addressing some of these challenges. Our experience has demonstrated that a trans-disciplinary health data science approach that involves collaboration between statisticians, informaticians, computer scientists, and physician scientists can accelerate innovation in harnessing the full power of EHRs to tackle complex real-world problems and exert meaningful impact in medicine. To this end, I will also discuss some open questions that present opportunities for future research and collaboration.

CIS Seminar: "Privacy-Preserving Accountability Online"
2023-02-28 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Technologies that enable confidential communication and anonymous authentication are important for improving privacy for users of internet services. Unfortunately, encryption and anonymity, while good for privacy, make it hard to hold bad actors accountable for misbehavior. Internet services rely on seeing message content to detect spam and other harmful content; services must also be able to identify users to attribute and respond to abuse complaints. This tension between privacy and accountability leads to one of two suboptimal outcomes: Services require excessive trust in centralized entities to hold users accountable for misbehavior, or services leave themselves and/or their users open to abuse.
In this talk, I will highlight two example applications, end-to-end encrypted messaging and anonymous web browsing, where this tension arises and how gaps in accountability can lead to real-world attacks. I will discuss how I have addressed this tension through the design of new cryptographic protocols that preserve user privacy while also providing mechanisms for holding bad actors accountable. In particular, I will cover new protocols for anonymous blocklisting, one-time-use credentials, and transparent key infrastructure.

ESE Spring Seminar - "An Architect’s Perspective on Quantum Computer Scaling: Why, What, and How?"
2023-02-28 12:30 - 13:30 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Quantum computation has potential to solve problems that are out of reach for today’s classical computers. Many of the proposed applications for quantum computers (QCs), such as those in chemistry, material science, and optimization, are capable of substantial human impact. However, the full promise of quantum will only be realized if better qubits and QCs emerge that are capable of large-scale computation. The roadmap to QC scaling does not only contain a single path but many that run in parallel. In addition to pursuing devices with more qubits, quantum researchers must 1) co-design software that pushes the frontier of existing machines and 2) build models that guide future QC design toward optimized performance. In this talk, I discuss the why, what, and how involved with scaling today’s QCs. First, I motivate the pursuit of quantum computing and introduce fundamental concepts. Next, I present a case study that explores optimized quantum circuit compilation, reducing decoherence via circuit slack. I show how quantum algorithms can adapt to the unique characteristics of today’s QCs through optimized gate scheduling, leading to significant improvements in success during runtime. In the third part of this talk, hardware challenges that restrict the number qubits on-chip are highlighted. With a focus on fixed-frequency transmon QCs, I explore the viability of modular architectures to scale quantum devices, presenting promising results in terms of yield, gate performance, and application-based analysis. Finally, an outlook is given on future directions in QC software and hardware co-design that aim to accelerate progress toward achieving practical quantum machines.

BE Master's Student Focus Group
2023-02-28 10:30 - 11:30 | PA
Attention BE Master’s Students! We want your thoughts on the job search! Sign up for this upcoming focus group to give us your opinion on industries of interest, employers & recruiting events.
Register now: http://tinyurl.com/bdzz8cna.
Contact Lauren Kemp with any questions: laurem@seas.upenn.edu

MSE Seminar: "Chemical Bonds in Topological Materials" (Princeton University)
2023-02-28 10:30 - 11:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Topological materials are solid-state compounds that have atypical charge carriers, often acting analogously to particles in high-energy physics. They are significant for both fundamental and applied science, with potential uses in spintronics, catalysis, and quantum information science. But despite the great promise of this field, the majority of known topological materials conform to the same handful of structure types. By utilizing chemical principles, we can design and discover new topological materials and investigate their unusual charge transport and magnetism.
In the first half of my talk, I will focus on synthetic routes to new subchalcogenide topological semimetals. Subchalcogenides are a hybrid class of materials between intermetallics and chalcogenides, containing both metal-metal and metal-chalcogenide interactions. Their diverse bonding character leads to quasi-lower-dimensional metallic substructures, which have greater potential for electron-electron interactions. The subchalcogenides Ir2In8Q (Q = S, Se, Te) are a newly reported family of Dirac semimetals, with large, anistropic magnetoresistance, high charge carrier mobility, and reversible electronic instabilities. This family of compounds offer a new platform for probing the interactions of electronic instabilities and topology, along with expanding the known library of topological structures. In the second half of my talk, I will discuss hypervalent (electron-rich) chemical bonding as a design principle for new topological semimetals, with a focus on quasi-one-dimensional hypervalent Bi chains. Delocalized, electron-rich bonding has been shown to be an effective design principle to find new topological square-net materials, with band inversion occurring at the Fermi level of compounds with the ideal electron count and number of atoms in the unit cell. Through these synthetic and bonding approaches to identifying new topological materials, we show that chemists play a vital role in advancing the field.

MEAM Seminar: "Solid Interfaces in Electrochemical Devices"
2023-02-28 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
While lithium (Li) ion battery technology has had major successes, at the current rate of progress, it is unlikely to meet the mid-century global demands related to full de-carbonization and interruption of fossil fuel usage for transportation and energy generation. The replacement of currently used anodes by Li metal is one of the most promising alternatives to solve this problem. However, various obstacles hinder its commercialization, many of which are related to phenomena happening at the interface between the anode and the electrolyte. In this talk, some of the interface-related issues that plague Li-ion and Li-metal batteries are discussed. Using a well-established electrodeposition model for solid electrolytes, we conceptualize and engineer a polymer composite separator capable of harnessing advantageous properties of its components at their interfaces. The synergistic interaction between two of the most common components of the solid electrolyte interphase is also probed, and the interface between them is shown to significantly enhance the conduction of charge carriers. By combining first-principles methods with thermodynamic modeling, we explore the importance of interfaces in the context of void and pit formation. A similar methodology is also employed to examine Li intercalation in twisted bilayer graphene systems. The methods and principles used in these studies rely on computational approaches that are broadly applicable — and indeed critical — for applications that require engineering at the nanoscale.

Joseph Bordogna Forum: Dr. Gary May, Chancellor of UC-Davis
2023-02-27 15:00 - 16:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Please save the date to join us for this annual distinguished lecture.
The Joseph Bordogna Forum will foster conversation and debate regarding important issues at the nexus of technology and society. It will feature lectures and panel discussions on a wide range of contemporary issues that are central to engineering including diversity and inclusion, the role of technology in our social fabric, and questions of fairness, justice and equity.
“The Diversity Imperative”
Monday, February 27, 2023
3:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Wu and Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall
3330 Walnut Street
Dr. May’s talk was recorded and is available for viewing here.

PSOC Seminar: “Mechanical checkpoint of monocyte fate in viscoelastic extracellular matrix” (Kyle Vining, Penn Dental Medicine)
2023-02-27 13:00 - 14:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Spring 2023 Hybrid-Seminar Series
Mondays 1.00-2.00 pm (EST)
Towne 225 / Raisler Lounge
“For Zoom link, please contact <manu@seas.upenn.edu>”

CEMB Panel: Recruiting and Supporting URM PhD students
2023-02-24 13:30 - 15:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Join the discussion on challenges and strategies in the recruitment of URM PhD students and supporting them in graduate study. Invited panelists will provide their perspectives at the graduate program, research center, and laboratory levels.
Join in person or via Zoom. Please contact annjeong@seas.upenn.edu at least one day prior for Zoom link.

Spring 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Jitendra Malik, University of California at Berkeley, "Robots that Learn and Adapt"
2023-02-24 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. This week’s presenter will be in-person as well.

ABSTRACT
Deep learning has resulted in remarkable breakthroughs in fields such as speech recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, and protein structure prediction. Robotics has proved to be much more challenging as there are no pre-existing repositories of behavior to draw upon; rather the robot has to learn from its own trial and error in its own specific body, and it has to generalize and adapt. To make this feasible, we have developed “Rapid Motor Adaptation”, a novel technique for adaptive control in the framework of deep reinforcement learning. Using this, we can train robots in simulation and then transfer the skills directly to robots in the real world. I will show multiple examples – quadruped legged locomotion, biped locomotion, in-hand rotation, flying quadcopters – of the success of this approach. I will also show examples of life-long learning in robotics, by continuous adaptation of perception and action in deployed systems.

CIS Seminar: "Cryptography, Security, and Law"
2023-02-23 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
My research focuses on the security, privacy, and transparency of technologies in societal and legal context. My talk will focus on three of my recent works in this space, relating to (1) preventing exploitation of stolen email data, (2) enhancing accountability in electronic surveillance, and (3) legal risks faced by security researchers.

MSE Seminar: "Design of Stable Nanocrystalline Alloys: Thermodynamics, Computation, and Data Science" (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2023-02-23 10:30 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Over the last three decades, nanocrystalline alloys (polycrystals with grain sizes of less than 100 nm) have been shown to exhibit superior material properties, such as enhanced specific strength, hardness, wear resistance, radiation resistance, and magnetic properties. However, such structures are inherently thermodynamically unstable; a nanocrystalline configuration comes with a large volume fraction of high-energy bearing defects that introduce a large excess of energy in the structure. The key route to overcome this limitation and thermodynamically stabilize nanocrystalline metals against grain growth is through intentional alloying for grain boundary segregation. To date, the standard approach to designing and screening for nanocrystalline stability uses a highly simplified model in which grain boundary networks are treated as a “single” entity, and the tendency of solute atoms to segregate at those boundaries is quantified by an “averaged” value. This simplification, however, ignores the fact that grain boundaries in polycrystals have a vast range of local atomic environments that can attract or repel solute atoms to different degrees. In this talk, I will review our recent efforts to tackle this simplification by developing thermodynamic, computational, and data science frameworks to (i) thoroughly understand the phenomenon of grain boundary segregation at the atomistic scale, (ii) develop comprehensive segregation databases for hundreds of substitutional alloys, and (iii) leverage that knowledge and data into developing rigorous design and screening criteria for nanocrystalline alloys that take into account the spectrality of the grain boundary network.

MEAM Seminar: "Mechanics for Energy Sustainability: From Fatigue of 2D Materials to Dendrites in Solid-state Batteries"
2023-02-23 10:00 - 11:30 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Achieving energy sustainability requires efforts from not only sourcing clean energy, but also storing and dispatching energy whenever and wherever needed, as well as being energy-efficient whenever possible. Two-dimensional (2D) materials hold great promises as mechanical reinforcement in high strength-to-weight ratio structural materials and as next-generation energy-efficient electronic materials, both of which contribute to less energy consumption with improved performance. Among energy-storage technologies, solid-state batteries (SSB) are particularly attractive due to potentially higher energy density and safer non-flammable solid electrolytes compared with conventional lithium-ion batteries. However, both 2D materials and components of SSB are often exposed to static and dynamic mechanical stresses, posing critical challenges towards their wide applications. The first part of the talk will discuss the mechanical fatigue behavior of 2D materials and their interfaces, reveal their unconventional failure mechanisms, and propose practical strategies to improve their mechanical reliability. The second part will focus on the lithium dendrite issues in SSB and discuss the coupled electro-chemo-mechanical effect in the failure of a garnet solid electrolyte. Through in-situ FIB/SEM experiments, the critical role of stress in regulating the failure of SSB during fast charging is revealed.

CBE Seminar Series: "Developing Strategies for Polymer Redesign and Recycling Using Reaction Pathway Analysis" (Linda Broadbelt, Northwestern University)
2023-02-22 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
The current lack of sustainability of and the limited portfolio of recycling processes for synthetic polymers have posed serious threats to the environment. Using reaction pathway analysis, we are pursuing a portfolio of strategies for redesign and recycling of polymers for sustainability. Pyrolysis is a promising method for resource recovery from plastic waste that is compatible with current petrochemical infrastructure that thermally converts polymers in the absence of oxygen into valuable chemical feedstocks and monomer. To provide further insight into polymer pyrolysis, a greater understanding of the mechanistic and kinetic details of the underlying reaction network is needed. To handle the complexity of mechanistic modeling of polymer degradation, we have developed both continuum and kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) models. Alternatively, redesign efforts focusing on polymers that can be reused and recycled to monomers can lead to sustainable solutions for the plastics waste problem. One pathway to success is to identify bioprivileged molecules, biology-derived chemical intermediates that can be efficiently converted to a diversity of chemical products, including both novel molecules and drop-in replacements, and molecules emanating from them that can be used as monomers leading to recyclable polymers. We have developed a framework for molecule discovery and reaction pathway design that is automated and flexible and can be used to screen for bioprivileged candidates and target molecules. The application to discovery of known and novel monomers for poly(hydroxyurethanes) that are derived from biobased molecules and lead to recyclable materials will be discussed, and computational methods to evaluate the recyclability of different polymers will be outlined.

Bio:
Linda Broadbelt is Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (ChBE) and Associate Dean for Graduate Research and Education of Engineering at Northwestern University. She was Chair of the Department of ChBE from 2009-2017. Her research and teaching interests are in multiscale modeling, complex kinetics modeling, catalysis, novel biochemical pathways, and polymerization/depolymerization kinetics. She served as the Past Chair, Chair, First Vice Chair and Second Vice Chair of the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division of AIChE, and also served on the Executive Board of the National Program Committee of AIChE and the Board of Directors. She is currently an Associate Editor for Industrial&Engineering Chemistry Research and ACS Engineering Au. Her honors include selection as the winner of the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering from AIChE, the E.V. Murphree Award in Industrial Chemistry and Engineering from the American Chemical Society, the Dorothy Ann and Clarence Ver Steeg Award, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and an AIChE Women’s Initiative Committee Mentorship Excellence Award, and selection as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of AIChE, a Fellow of AIMBE, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019. In 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Spring 2023 GRASP SFI: Jinwei Ye, George Mason University, "Seeing 3D with Polarized Light"
2023-02-22 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. This week’s presenter will be in-person as well.
ABSTRACT
Polarization is a fundamental property of light that describes the direction in which the electric field of light oscillates. Polarization, as an intrinsic property of light, provides an extra dimension of information for probing the physical world. Many insects can see and make use of polarized light. For example, bumble bees use the sky’s polarization pattern for fast navigation. However, the polarization of light is often overlooked in computer vision as human eyes do not have such sensitivity. In this talk, I will talk about the principles of polarization sensing and the modeling of polarimetric appearance. I will showcase several polarimetric imaging solutions for performing high quality 3D reconstruction in challenging scenes. I will also demonstrate their applications in robotic sensing.

Jennifer Crossen Dissertation Defense
2023-02-22 12:00 - 14:00 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States

Future Leaders in Mechanobiology: Windie Hofs (Crick Institute/UCL)
2023-02-22 11:00 - 12:00 | https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96715197752
Launched in May 2021, the Future Leaders in Mechanobiology is a monthly seminar series featuring up-and-coming leaders in mechanobiology–PhD students and postdocs from a wide range of fields, backgrounds, and institutions. By providing an international stage to share one’s work and opportunities to interact with researchers at all career stages, we aim to create an inclusive and valuable series for early-stage researchers and the mechanobiology community as a whole.
Future Leaders in Mechanobiology will meet via Zoom on the third Wednesday of the month, at 11am ET (8am PT, 10am CT), and all are welcome to attend. Recordings of past talks and the future schedule can be found below.
Register here: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98208519228?pwd=[REDACTED]

CIS Seminar: "Secure Computation with Minimal Interaction"
2023-02-21 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
In the current digital and decentralized world, there is an imminent need for technologies that can provide a fast approach to compute on private data while guaranteeing secrecy. Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is one such cryptographic technology that provides an efficient approach to compute on private data. At a high level, MPC is a distributed computation protocol that allows a set of mutually distrusting parties to compute a joint function on their private inputs while only leaking the output and hiding everything else.
Any distributed computation protocol typically involves multiple rounds of back-and-forth interaction between the parties. A key question that is of both theoretical and practical importance is to minimize the number of rounds of such interaction to its absolute limit. This is the problem of constructing round-optimal MPC protocols.
In this talk, I will describe new techniques to construct such round-optimal protocols. These techniques have been instrumental in resolving several long-standing open problems in the area and have also opened up the possibility of constructing practically efficient round-optimal protocols.

ESE Spring Seminar - "In pursuit of entanglement: XXZ interactions for spin-squeezing in atomic and solid-state spin ensembles"
2023-02-21 12:30 - 13:30 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Controlling many-body entanglement promises to yield both fundamental insights and practical advances. In particular, generating squeezed states for entanglement-enhanced metrology is an important near-term application of quantum systems. In past work, squeezing has been achieved in a clean, controlled setting using all-to-all Ising interactions between ultracold atoms in an optical cavity. By contrast, optically-addressable spin defects in solids, such as the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond, are far more practical and versatile sensors, but it is not known whether the requisite ingredients for generating and detecting squeezing are attainable in this platform.
In this talk, I will discuss two complementary approaches for generating squeezed states using XXZ interactions. The first approach centers around a cavity QED platform designed to realize programmable, nonlocal spin-spin couplings. Specifically, we implement an all-to-all XXZ Hamiltonian with tunable anisotropy, strength, and sign. Images of the resulting magnetization dynamics show that XXZ interactions protect spin coherence against spatial inhomogeneities, which may enhance the robustness of future spin-squeezing protocols.
The robustness of the XXZ model against disorder opens the door to squeezing via long-range dipolar interactions within an ensemble of spin defects in diamond, for which we identify and achieve the key required ingredients: (i) a theory that elucidates if and how power-law XXZ interactions generate squeezing; (ii) a two-dimensional ensemble of strongly-interacting, optically-polarizable spins; (iii) methods for detecting squeezing despite significant technical noise.

MEAM Seminar: "Leveraging Unsteady Flows for Enhanced Performance in Wind-Energy Systems"
2023-02-21 10:00 - 11:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Wind energy is poised to play a considerable role in the global transition to clean-energy technologies within the next few decades. Modern wind turbines, like aircraft and other aerodynamic structures, are typically designed with the assumption that the flows they encounter will be uniform and steady. However, atmospheric flows are highly unsteady, and systems operating within them must contend with gust disturbances that can lead to performance losses and structural damage. Therefore, the next generation of wind-energy systems requires physics-informed design principles that effectively account for and even leverage these unsteady flow phenomena for enhanced power generation, robustness, and operational longevity. Accordingly, this talk presents experimental and analytical efforts to characterize unsteady aerodynamics in wind-turbine contexts. First, we study the effects of unsteady streamwise motion on turbine performance, as recent work has suggested that these dynamics may enable time-averaged efficiencies that exceed the steady-flow Betz limit on turbine efficiency. The power production of and flow around a periodically surging wind turbine are thus investigated using experiments and analytical modeling, which suggest that floating offshore wind turbines could leverage unsteady surge motions for power-production gains of up to 6% over the stationary case. Additionally, field measurements in the wakes of full-scale vertical-axis wind turbines using artificial snow as tracer particles yield insights into the contributions of unsteady vortex dynamics to the performance of turbines in wind-farm arrays. These investigations provide the analytical and experimental foundations for future studies of unsteady atmospheric flows, which will lead to the development of principles and techniques for wind-farm siting, control, and optimization.

CBE Seminar Series: "Engineered CRISPR Systems for Disease Treatment and Diagnostics" (Xue Sherry Gao, Rice University)
2023-02-20 13:00 - 14:00 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
The recent discovery of the CRISPR genome editing systems has been revolutionizing both basic biological research and the treatment of human genetic disorders. However, there are remaining challenges in improving the precision and multiplexity of the current CRISPR systems for genome manipulation. In this seminar, I will overview our recent development of highly specific and powerful genome-editing tools for the treatment and diagnostics of diseases and the discovery of
new potential small-molecule drugs. First, I will introduce the development of high-precision and multiplex CRISPR genome-editing strategies for safe and effective molecular therapy to treat genetic disorders; Second, I will describe the application of these advanced CRISPR tools for fungi genome engineering to enable the production of novel small molecules with therapeutic potential; Finally, I will present the improved ultrasensitive viral detection by using the engineered CRISPR systems to advance timely and accurate diagnostics for the current and future pandemics and epidemics.
Bio:
Dr. Xue (Sherry) Gao obtained her doctoral degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. She was a postdoctoral associate in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Gao joined Rice University in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as the Ted N. Law assistant professor in July 2017. In the past five years, Dr. Gao won the 2022 NSF CAREER AWARD, the 2022 Outstanding Young Faculty of Rice School of Engineering, the 2020 NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, the 2018 InterDisciplinary Excellence Award, and the 2018 Hamill Innovation Award from Rice, etc.

Spring 2023 GRASP on Robotics: Jeremy D. Brown, Johns Hopkins University, "Understanding the Utility of Haptic Feedback in Telerobotic Devices"
2023-02-17 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. This week’s presenter will be in-person as well.

ABSTRACT
The human body is capable of dexterous manipulation in many different environments. Some environments, however, are challenging to access because of distance, scale, and limitations of the body itself. In many of these situations, access can be effectively restored via a telerobot. Dexterous manipulation through a telerobot is possible only if the telerobot can accurately relay any sensory feedback resulting from its interactions in the environment to the operator. In this talk, I will discuss recent work from our lab focused on the application of haptic feedback in various telerobotic applications. I will begin by describing findings from recent investigations comparing different haptic feedback and autonomous control approaches for upper-extremity prosthetic limbs, as well as the cognitive load of haptic feedback in these prosthetic devices. I will then discuss recent discoveries on the potential benefits of haptic feedback in robotic minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) training. Finally, I will discuss current efforts in our lab to measure haptic perception through novel telerobotic interfaces.

CIS Seminar: "Birds of a Feather Flock Together: How Homophily Leads to Segregation, Inequality, and Inefficiency and What We Can Do About It"
2023-02-16 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Humans exhibit a strong tendency to associate with those similar to them. This tendency, termed homophily in the social sciences, impacts both the structure of society and its outcomes. In this talk, Nicole Immorlica discusses the mathematics of homophily. She first quantifies its theoretical implications for geographic segregation. We will see that even tolerant societies exhibit segregation, as weak local preferences can have ripple effects with global consequences. This geographic segregation, in turn, reinforces homophily. Immorlica then explores the role of homophily in inequality and economic productivity. She starts from the observation that most employment is driven by referrals. As social networks tend to exhibit homophily, these referrals are also homophilous, perpetuating existing inequality. This inequality, in turn, is harmful to productivity, causing inefficiencies in the economy. She concludes by suggesting policy interventions that can both reduce inequality and improve productivity. Finally, should time permit, she explores a rational basis for homophily in social networks, showing that people prefer to listen to those similar to them because they get more accurate information from such interactions.
