This talk will present multidisciplinary work from material composites and robotics. We have created new types of actuators, sensors, displays, and additive manufacturing techniques for soft robots and haptic interfaces. For example, we now use stretchable optical waveguides as sensors for high accuracy, repeatability, and material compatibility with soft actuators. For displaying information, we have […]
Correctness and security problems in modern computer systems can result from problematic hardware event orderings and interleavings during an application’s execution. Since hardware designs are complex and since a single user-facing instruction can exhibit a variety of different hardware execution sequences, analyzing and verifying systems for correct event orderings is challenging. My work addresses these […]
Identity is an enduring and continuous sense of who one is and is often thought of as the answer to the questions, “Who am I, Who can I be, and Where do I belong?” Research shows that developing a robust engineering identity is important for academic and personal development, integration into engineering, and retention within […]
Flexible slender structures in flow are everywhere. While a great deal is known about individual flexible fibers interacting with fluids, considerably less work has been done on fiber ensembles — such as fur or hair — in flow. These hairy surfaces are abundant in nature and perform multiple functions from thermal regulation to water harvesting […]
Almost every subfield of electrical engineering and computer science are undergoing disruptive times. With Moore's Law coming to an end, an expanded roadmap for semiconductors beyond traditional CMOS scaling becomes unclear. At the other end, traditional application software development is being replaced by emerging machine learning techniques whose success will, in turn, rely on the […]
Modern technological developments have enabled the acquisition and storage of increasingly large-scale, high-resolution, and high-dimensional data in many fields. Yet in domains such as biomedical data, the complexity of these datasets and the unavailability of ground truth pose significant challenges for data analysis and modeling. In this talk, I present new unsupervised geometric approaches for […]
In this presentation we discuss several properties of the flow structure and turbulence in the wind turbine array boundary layer (WTABL). This particular type of shear flow develops when the atmospheric boundary layer interacts with an array of large wind turbines. Based on such understanding, we aim to develop reduced order, analytically tractable models. These […]
Abstract: While computers can help us manage data, human judgment and domain expertise is what turns it into understanding. Meeting the challenges of increasingly large and complex data requires methods that richly integrate the capabilities of both people and machines. In response to these challenges, my research combines methods from visualization, data management, human-computer interaction, […]
Abstract: Deep learning has become pervasive in everyday life, powering language applications like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Translate. The inherent limitation of these deep learning systems, however, is that they often function as a “black box,” preventing researchers and users from discerning the roles of different components and what they learn during the […]
The vacuum of space may seem empty and boring; however, this void is actually teeming with activity. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, fluctuations of electromagnetic fields are omnipresent even in empty space. These fluctuations can manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including the generation of nanoscale forces between objects—a phenomenon known as […]
Abstract: Human intelligence is beyond pattern recognition. From a single image, we're able to explain what we see, reconstruct them in 3D, predict what's going to happen, and plan our actions. In this talk, I will present our recent work on physical scene understanding---reverse-engineering these capacities to make machines that are versatile, data-efficient, and have […]
Quantum information science strives to utilize the fundamental laws of physics to achieve revolutionary improvement in computation, communication, and sensing. Existing quantum protocols rely on a wide variety of physical platforms for storing, transferring, and processing of quantum information. Optical photons are the ideal carriers of information because of their low loss, large bandwidth of […]
In many areas of science and engineering, novel signal acquisition methods allow unprecedented access to physical measurements. From digital cameras to microscopes and nano-scale biosensors, the data generated are shaped by both the underlying physics of the phenomena and characteristics of the acquisition device. Meanwhile, in many practical scenarios, the useful signals are remarkably weak, […]
Abstract: A key task in astronomy is to locate astronomical objects in images and to characterize them according to physical parameters such as brightness, color, and morphology. This task, known as cataloging, is challenging for several reasons: many astronomical objects are much dimmer than the sky background, labeled data is generally unavailable, overlapping astronomical objects […]
Abstract: In classic supervised machine learning, a learning agent behaves as a passive observer: it receives examples from some external environment which it has no control over and then makes predictions. Reinforcement Learning (RL), on the other hand, is fundamentally interactive : an autonomous agent must learn how to behave in an unknown and possibly […]
Optimization and sampling are both of central importance in large-scale machine learning problems, but they are typically viewed as very different problems. This talk presents recent results that exploit the interplay between them. Viewing Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms as performing an optimization over the space of probability distributions, we demonstrate analogs of Nesterov's acceleration approach in the sampling domain, […]
Surface tension plays a critical role in a wide range of biological, environmental, technological and geophysical settings. In this talk, I will present three different problems dealing with interfacial soft matter that find motivation in markedly diverse areas. First, I will discuss the evaporation kinetics and flow dynamics of non-spherical sessile drops undergoing phase change. […]
New optical nanomaterials hold the potential for breakthroughs in a wide range of areas from ultrafast optoelectronics such as modulators, light sources and hyperspectral detectors, to efficient upconversion for energy applications, bio-sensing and quantum information science. An exciting opportunity to realize such new nanomaterials lies in controlling the local electromagnetic environment on the atomic- and […]
Since the dawn of civilization, we have functioned in a social environment where we spend our days interacting with other humans. As we approach a society where intelligent systems and humans coexist, these systems must also interpret and interact with humans that reside in the 3D world. While computer vision systems today work well for […]
As cities grow everywhere, and urban roadways become overburdened, efficient strategies are required for improving mobility. With the prevalence of smart sensing and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as smartphones and smart intersections, the physical infrastructures of our cities are being connected to the cyber world. As a result, cities are becoming smart. Moreover, […]
Join the Office of Diversity and Inclusion for an afternoon with Christopher Hart, who will discuss the state and future of autonomous vehicles. The talk will be followed by a reception.
Layered abstractions in the computing stack are critical to building complex systems, but the existing *interfaces* between layers restrict what can be done at each level. Enhancing cross-layer interfaces--specifically, the hardware-software interface--is crucial towards addressing two important and hard-to-solve challenges in computer systems today: First, significant effort and expertise are required to write high-performance code […]
Abstract: The ability to engineer controllable atom-photon interactions is at the heart of quantum optics and quantum information processing. In this talk, I will introduce a nanophotonic platform for engineering strong atom-photon interactions on a semiconductor chip. I will first discuss an experimental demonstration of a spin-photon quantum transistor , a fundamental building block for […]
