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 […]
I am a quantum engineer interested in how quantum physics informs biology at the nanoscale. As a physicist, I have developed high-performance nanosensors that essentially worked due to room-temperature quantum effects in noisy environments. Currently, I am focusing on “living sensors” -- organisms and cells that respond to minute stimuli, routinely outperforming technological probes in […]
Why is robotic manipulation so hard? As humans, we are unrivaled in our ability to dexterously manipulate objects and exhibit complex skills seemingly effortlessly. Recent research in cognitive science suggests that this ability is driven by our internal representations of the physical world, built over a life-time of experience. Our predictive ability is complemented by […]
Implantable and wearable medical devices are increasingly being developed as alternative therapies for intractable diseases. In particular, undertreated neurological disorders such as epilepsy, migraine, and Alzheimer’s disease are of major public health concern around the world, driving the need to explore such new approaches. Despite significant advances in neural interface systems, the small number of […]
What would it mean for a machine to see the world? Computer vision has recently made great progress on problems such as finding categories of objects and scenes, and poses of people in images. However, studying such tasks in isolated disembodied contexts, divorced from the physical source of their images, is insufficient to build intelligent […]
Abstract: Natural language can be used to construct rich, compositional descriptions of the world, highlighting for example entities (nouns), events (verbs), and the interactions between them (simple sentences). In this talk, I show how compositional structure around verbs and nouns can be repurposed to build computer vision systems that scale to recognize hundreds of thousands […]
Fast-paced changes across the computing stack are creating opportunities for innovation by bridging software, architecture, and VLSI. Cross-cutting research is challenging, but it can expose key insights that would otherwise be hidden by abstractions. In this talk, I will demonstrate a cross-stack approach to improve the efficiency of task-based parallel runtimes, which are important because […]
This presentation will describe microfluidic technologies to conveniently produce life-like pulsatile flows along with applications to study of lung injury, enhancement of in vitro fertilization, and analysis of frequency-dependent cellular responses. The microfluidic technologies range from adaptation of piezo-electric actuator arrays from Braille displays to design of microfluidic circuits that can be designed to switch […]
Integrated circuits have fueled several revolutions that have deeply impacted modern society, including the computing revolution, the internet and the first two wireless revolutions. We are at the dawn of the third wireless revolution, which I call the Wireless Mobile Reality revolution. Over the next fifteen years, new wireless paradigms spanning from radio frequencies to […]
Abstract: The mammalian heart has been sculpted by millions of years of evolution into a flow pump par excellence. During the typical lifetime of a human, the heart will beat over three billion times and pump enough blood to fill over 60 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Each of these billions of cardiac cycles is itself a […]
Gold and iron oxide nanoparticles have unique and tunable properties that allow transduction of optical (light), or radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic fields to affect heating of biomaterials at multiple scales. This talk will explore the underlying physics and relative advantages of each form of nanoparticle heating for therapeutic treatment of cancer or other disease by heating […]
Users often fall for phishing emails, reuse simple passwords, and fail to effectively utilize "provably" secure systems. These behaviors expose users to significant harm and frustrate industry practitioners and security researchers alike. As consequences of security breaches become ever more grave, it is important to study why humans behave seemingly irrationally. In this talk, I […]
Computing machinery such as smartphones are ubiquitous, and so will be smart home appliances, self-driving cars and robots in the near future. Enabling these machines with natural language understanding abilities opens up potential opportunities for the broader society to benefit from, e.g., in accessing the world’s knowledge, or in controlling complex machines with little effort. […]
We will discuss a number of legitimate and of wrongful applications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in particular, in the screening of chemical processes. We consider how ideas of equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics can be of value in some non-equilibrium situations, particularly in the cases of very slow diffusion and reaction.
While state-of-the-art machine learning models are deep, large-scale, sequential and highly nonconvex, the backbone of modern learning algorithms are simple algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent, or Q-learning (in the case of reinforcement learning tasks). A basic question endures---why do simple algorithms work so well even in these challenging settings? This talk focuses on two […]
Cells migrate collectively to form tissues, to heal wounds, and, in cancer, to metastasize. During these biological processes, the collective migration exhibits a transition from a solid-like state, wherein cell positions remain fixed, to a fluid-like state, wherein cells flow freely and rearrange their positions with their neighbors. Recent mechanics-based models and experiments have demonstrated […]
As our world becomes more computerized, security and privacy takes on a prominent role in allowing us to enjoy the benefits of new technologies without the risks. Addressing the new challenges that come with this role requires a change in how we approach and solve problems in computer security. My vision is that we must […]
Light carries energy and heat, and plays a key role in many energy-conversion processes. The capabilities to tailor electromagnetic energy transfer at the nanoscale represent important opportunities for novel energy applications. In this talk I will present two sets of studies integrating experiments and theory. In the first part, I will discuss how to use […]
Though rooted in pure mathematics, algebraic topology has recently enabled novel analysis techniques for biological data. Specifically, the method called persistent homology which employs ideas from topology to characterize the voids in a complex network. In this talk, I will briefly introduce persistent homology and give an overview of how we have recently applied this […]
At the macroscale, synchronization between brain regions is believed to be important for memory and attention. Injury, including mild traumatic brain injury, can both increase and decrease synchronization as measured by functional MRI, but these changes are not well understood and are unknown at a smaller spatial scale. Here, we examined how injury affects the […]
In this talk, we present recent progress towards developing learning-based control strategies for the design of safe and robust autonomous systems. Our approach is to recognize that machine learning algorithms produce inherently uncertain estimates or predictions, and that this uncertainty must be explicitly quantified (e.g., using non-asymptotic guarantees of contemporary high-dimensional statistics) and accounted for […]
Abstract: Existing state-of-the-art computer vision models usually specialize in single domains or tasks, while human-level recognition can be contextual for diverse scales and tasks. This specialization isolates different vision tasks and hinders deployment of robust and effective vision systems. In this talk, I will discuss contextural image representations for different scales and tasks through the […]
Material properties are governed by the chemical composition and spatial arrangement of constituent elements. Over the past decade, the field of architected materials has sought to design, fabricate, and demonstrate materials with performance that is fundamentally controlled by geometry at multiple length-scales rather than chemical composition alone. There have been many advancements ranging from the […]
Presented by the students of BE 370 (Medical Device Development): Come to the MedTech Panel Series to hear about these experiences and more from some of the most successful founders and CEOs in the industry! Our panelists will share their stories on how they took innovation from the bench to the boardroom and built multi-million […]
Abstract: Parallelism is critical to achieve high performance in modern computer systems. Unfortunately, most programs scale poorly beyond a few cores, and those that scale well often require heroic implementation efforts. This is because current architectures squander most of the parallelism available in applications and are too hard to program. I will present Swarm, a […]
To move through tissues, cancer cells must navigate a complex, heterogeneous network of fibers in the extracellular matrix. This network of fibers also provides chemical, structural and mechanical cues to the resident cells. In this talk, I will describe my lab’s efforts to understand the forces driving cell movements in the tumor microenvironment. Combining tissue […]
This professional development workshop is designed to provide Penn Engineering graduate students and postdocs with a richer understanding of what it is like to pursue a career in academia from those that have navigated the process successfully. Deputy Dean Kathleen J. Stebe (SEAS) will lead this extemporaneous panel discussions with a mix of both tenured […]
