One grand challenge for materials and structures design is to satisfy multiple conflicting requirements. For example, energy infrastructure, especially those in remote and extreme environments such as offshore wind turbines and nuclear reactors, requires components to operate effectively over long time periods and avoid catastrophic failures. Structural materials in aviation must be lightweight but high […]
We seek the ability to take a few images of a scene of interest, and turn it into an immersive visual experience, where one can explore it from different viewpoints, in effect visualizing a 3D representation of an object, scene or photograph, and providing numerous applications in augmented reality, e-commerce and 3D photography. This problem, […]
The two most popular vehicles for communicating uncertainty in the estimates of an unknown quantity are confidence sets and conformal sets. The set produced and its corresponding probability guarantee (conditional on the feature vector) depend upon assumptions the analyst has made about the underlying data generating process. For example, are the residuals independent and normally […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT Most tasks people wish robots could do (fetching objects across rooms, assisting in the kitchen, tidying) require mobile manipulation, the integration of navigation and manipulation. While robots have made remarkable progress in each skill independently, bringing them together […]
Abstract: Biomolecular condensates are membraneless compartments inside living cells that play critical roles in health and disease. Over the past two decades, a wide body of work has established that these compartments form through phase separation of molecules such as proteins and RNA. This discovery has sparked significant interest in uncovering the molecular factors that […]
After an introduction to quantum computing, we discuss the currently practiced framework of "hybrid" computing, which is a method of accelerating traditional High Performance Compute (HPC) with Quantum Processing Units. I will talk about some of the ways in which Dell's research office has implemented this idea and the value it can bring to modern […]
The next generation of intelligent and autonomous systems requires not only novel devices but also new silicon architectures and design workflows that transcend conventional approaches to deliver real-time learning, perception, and decision-making under severe power and resource constraints. In this talk, I will outline a cross-layer methodology for architecting silicon for embodied AI, from workload […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722 Weak-to-Strong Generalization (Burns et al., 2023) is the phenomenon whereby a strong student, say GPT-4, learns a task from a weak teacher, say GPT-2, and ends up significantly outperforming the teacher. We show that this phenomenon does not require a strong and complex learner like GPT-4, nor pre-training. We consider students and […]
This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Prevailing models in robotics reason about the world either as images (end-to-end learning approaches) or as a collection of rigid objects (classical approaches), but neither have proven to be suitable abstractions for manipulating cloth, ropes, piles of objects, plants, and natural terrain. My […]
This is an in-person event ONLY in AGH 306. ABSTRACT The future of AI is embodied — imagine intelligent agents that can navigate and manipulate the world, from robot assistants helping around the home to autonomous vehicles taking you anywhere safely. To act in the physical world, these agents must do more than process raw […]
Many autonomous systems (e.g, driverless cars and drones) must make decisions based on predictions of the future actions of other nearby agents, whose dynamics and intentions are unknown. E.g., autonomous cars must predict the motions of surrounding vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles. Autonomous racing drones must avoid crashing into other drones on the race course. Unfortunately, […]
Once considered exotic, diamond and gallium nitride (GaN) have become practical enablers for next-generation electronic systems. Their convergence—diamond providing exceptional thermal conductivity and GaN delivering high-efficiency power conversion—lays the groundwork for integrated thermal–power co-design. As computing, RF, and high-performance systems push toward higher power densities, conventional packaging and cooling approaches struggle to manage buried hotspots […]
Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) remains a major health crisis with profound social and economic burdens. Innovative strategies are needed to identify genetic risk and protective factors, model disease mechanisms, and accelerate therapeutic discovery. Advances in trustworthy AI and informatics now enable the integration of multimodal genetics, omics, imaging, and outcome data from large […]
Test-time compute has emerged as a new axis for scaling language model capabilities, yet we lack a principled understanding of this paradigm. What are the right algorithms and trade-offs for test-time scaling? What properties of the pre-trained model enable it? And can we better align pre-training recipes for test-time success? This talk addresses these questions […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT We introduce UMI-on-Legs, a new framework that combines real-world and simulation data for quadruped manipulation systems. We scale task-centric data collection in the real world using a hand-held gripper (UMI), providing a cheap way to demonstrate task-relevant manipulation […]
The ability to tune the bandgap of metal halide perovskites by alloying different halide ions is key to advancing tandem solar cells and light-emitting displays. However, this compositional flexibility also introduces challenges, most notably, the photoinduced migration of halide ions, which can degrade device performance. A prominent manifestation is photoinduced phase segregation in mixed-halide perovskites […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722 In this talk, I will introduce adaptive conformal selection (ACS), an interactive framework for model-free selection with guaranteed error control. Building on conformal selection (Jin and Candès, 2023b), ACS generalizes the approach to support human-in-the-loop adaptive data analysis. Under the ACS framework, we can partially reuse the data to boost the selection […]
This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Despite recent advances, humans are still more agile and dexterous than robots; yet human communication (nerves) and actuation (muscles) are slower and our musculo-skeletal system is more complex. This presentation will consider features of neuro-mechanics that may confer advantage. However, they also impose limitations. […]
Step back into the classroom with Penn Engineering! Join us for a series of TED Talk-style Lightning Talks featuring some of our most popular professors as they share their latest groundbreaking research. "Fragility and Resilience of the Soft Earth" Doug Jerolmack Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of Earth and Environmental Science […]
The volume fraction phi for random close packed (RCP) spheres is approximately 0.64. It is well known that higher RCP volume fractions are achieved by using collections of particles with a variety of sizes. The variety of sizes is often quantified by the polydispersity of the particle size distribution: the standard deviation of the radius […]
Radio frequency (RF) plasma technology is essential in modern semiconductor fabrication, enabling precise processes such as etching and deposition. As the industry advances toward increasingly complex three-dimensional structures and smaller nanoscale features, the demands on plasma-based processing continue to grow. Meeting these demands requires a new generation of RF power conversion and control systems that […]
One of the primary goals of ‘explainable AI’ is the identification of a small subset of explanatory variables in an attempt to understand interesting phenomena. The Markov blanket constitutes one such subset, essential for tasks involving causal interpretation, prediction, and robustness. In medical imaging, identifying such variables is particularly important for achieving generalization across sites […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/6130182858 We present a mathematical framework to analyze the training dynamics of deep ResNets that rigorously captures practical architectures (including Transformers) trained from standard random initializations. Our approach combines stochastic approximation of ODEs with propagation-of-chaos arguments to obtain tight convergence rates to the “infinite size” limit of the dynamics. It yields the […]
The rich set of mechanoreceptors found in human skin offers a versatile engineering interface for transmitting information and eliciting perceptions, potentially serving a broad range of applications in patient care and other important industries. Targeted multisensory engagement of these afferent units, however, faces persistent challenges, especially for wearable, programmable systems that need to operate adaptively […]
As the demand for computing power and complexity continues to grow, developing new paradigms of information processing is essential. Unconventional functionalities arising from atomically engineered materials offer pathways to address these challenges. This has motivated the rapid development of atomic-scale materials as building blocks for future nanosystems. Their integration into functional devices, however, is hindered […]
Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95189835192 Passcode: 797599
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT The space environment is remote and unpredictable, and the ability to manufacture in situ offers unique opportunities to address new challenges as they arise. However, the challenges faced in space are often mirrored on Earth. In hospitals, disaster […]
In this presentation we report the realization of novel semiconductor materials, as well as thin-film processing and morphology engineering, for flexible and stretchable organic electronic devices such as thin film transistors, solar cells, electrolyte gated transistors, sensors and neuromorphic circuits. On material development, we present “soft” small-molecules and polymers by co-polymerizing pi-deconjugated building blocks, properly […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722 Over the last two decades we have developed good understanding how to quantify the impact of strategic user behavior on outcomes in many games (including traffic routing and online auctions) and showed that the resulting bounds extend to repeated games assuming players use a form of learning (no-regret learning) to adapt to […]
Monitoring of oxygen concentration in biological tissues is essential for understanding cellular metabolism, mitochondrial function, and tissue regeneration. Mitochondrial dysfunction is linked to a wide range of metabolic and degenerative diseases, yet current diagnostic approaches lack the capability to continuously measure oxygen and metabolite dynamics in vivo. This work introduces an implantable electrochemical sensor platform […]
This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT The quest for intelligent robots capable of learning complex behaviors from limited data hinges critically on the design and integration of inductive biases—structured assumptions that guide learning and generalization. In this talk, Jan Peters explores the foundational role of inductive biases in robot […]
Many materials we eat, spread, squeeze, or 3D print are gels, soft amorphous solids whose solid component comprises self-assembled networks of particles, fibers, or agglomerates of proteins, polymers, and colloids. The space between and within human cells is permeated by self-assembled gel networks, the extra-cellular matrix and the cytoskeleton, whose self- organization and heterogeneity is […]
MRI remains the gold standard in neuroimaging, but its high costs, large footprint, and infrastructure requirements limit deployment in many settings—including intensive care units (ICUs), emergency vehicles, and neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). These challenges demand portable, low-cost MRI systems specifically engineered for operation in space- and power-limited environments. Rather than adapting commercial scanners, our […]
Despite decades of research, we still do not know how the brain integrates the many features of an object into a coherent whole, or whether artificial systems perform similar binding. In our first study, we find that large self-supervised vision transformers spontaneously develop a low-dimensional “same-object” representation that predicts whether two image patches belong to […]
The mechanical behavior of fiber network materials is characterized by large deformations before failure and a strain-stiffening stress-strain response. In this thesis, this is investigated using discrete simulations at the microstructural level along with theoretical and computational results from continuum models. Cauchy and first Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensors for discrete networks of central-force elements are defined […]
Many of the robustness properties that are required for real-world applications of AI would be realized by a model that has understood the world. But it is unclear how to measure understanding, let alone how to define it. This talk will propose theoretically-grounded definitions and metrics that test for a model's implicit understanding, or its […]
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT Marine robots have undergone significant growth, driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence, sensing technologies, and decision-making systems. As demands for ocean exploration, exploitation, and conservation continue to rise, there is an increasing necessity for advanced autonomy in […]
Suspensions of filamentous materials, or filamentous suspensions, represent a unique class of complex fluids in which the interplay between particle anisotropy and filament interactions – both intra- and inter-filament associations –gives rise to rich and tunable rheological behaviors. Such suspensions are ubiquitous across natural and engineered systems, with their applications ranging from the locomotion of microorganisms and […]
The development of automated experimental facilities and the growing trend of experimental data digitization brought enormous opportunities for radically advancing laboratories. As many laboratory research tasks involve predicting and understanding previously unknown physical or chemical relationships, the availability of experimental data enables machine learning (ML) approaches to substantially accelerate the conventional design-build-test-learn process. In this […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722 This talk reviews a theory of the functions learned by neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activations. At its core is the observation that deep ReLU networks can be characterized as solutions to data-fitting problems in certain infinite dimensional function spaces. The solutions are compositions of functions from Banach spaces of […]
This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. In this talk, I will present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) […]
The world is nonlinear and linked. In this talk, I will present the origin of the small-gain theory and show that it serves as an important systematic tool for addressing two fundamental problems for networks: When is a dynamical network robustly stable? When can a dynamical network be made robustly stable by feedback? As an […]
Riccati equations are ubiquitous in systems/control theory and are frequently solved by the methods of continuous optimization. In some cases, it is known that solutions can be obtained quickly and efficiently by convex-optimization methods, but small modifications to these settings can easily destroy convexity, limiting the applicability of convex-optimization methods. This thesis considers manifold and […]
In recent years, numerous magnetic van der Waals layered quantum materials have been reported, including transition-metal halides, transition-metal chalcogenides, transition-metal phosphorus chalcogenides, and metal oxy- and chalco-halides. Unlike 3D counterparts, layered magnets can be easily and rapidly exfoliated to yield ultra-thin magnets, providing unique opportunities for both fundamental physics and new technologies. Furthermore, these materials […]
The goal of system identification (SysID) is to learn a mathematical model from a corpus of temporal observations of a system's inputs and outputs. SysID is a fundamental problem in engineering, with applications ranging from circuit design to robot control. Classical approaches to linear SysID rely on convex relaxations that offer strong theoretical guarantees. However, […]
This dissertation presents QuINT, a modular platform for integrating new quantum and optical science into the Internet’s IP-based optical network infrastructure. Building on a recently developed chip-powered quantum-classical hybrid networking framework, QuINT provides a detailed analysis and design for enhancing the precision of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) beyond that of existing standalone synchronization systems. […]
High-frequency power converters increasingly require magnetic components that are compact, efficient, and compatible with advanced integration. Conventional ferrites face limitations in scaling and high-frequency performance. This work introduces laminated NiFe magnetic structures fabricated through CMOS-compatible multilayer electroplating as a promising alternative. The materials and fabrication approach are demonstrated through silicon TSV inductors and transformers, PCB-integrated […]
Learning-based control architectures have unlocked remarkable capabilities in autonomous systems, from robotic manipulation to autonomous driving and traffic coordination. This progress has motivated the widespread use of layering to manage large-scale systems and multitask control to handle multiple systems and missions. The increasing integration of these architectures into society calls for a rigorous theory that […]
Most fluid flows at human scales and at moderate speeds (> 1 m/s) reach Reynolds numbers of at least 10⁴ or higher, causing even tiny disturbances to amplify and drive the flow toward turbulence. Turbulence is a broadband, continuum phenomenon: turbulent eddies of vastly different time and length scales enhance the mixing and transport of […]
It’s hard to write an abstract. It’s harder to write a glamorous one that tells your story without overselling your results. Last year, we hosted a virtual abstract-writing workshop where our P.I., Konrad Kording, reviewed and refined students’ abstracts live. Back by popular demand, the workshop returns — this time with a bonus! Participants can use […]
This presenter is one of the winners of the 2025 GRASP vote for internal PhD or postdoc SFI Speakers! This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT Deploying robots in diverse real-world environments is a fundamental challenge. While recent AI advances are impressive, robots still struggle […]
Abstract: Genetic engineering of plants is at the core of sustainability efforts, natural product synthesis, and agricultural crop engineering. Plant bioengineering requires delivery of biomolecules for genetic or post-transcriptional manipulation of plants, however, current delivery methods either suffer from host range limitations, low transformation efficiencies, tissue regenerability issues, tissue damage, or unavoidable DNA integration into […]
The realization of next-generation electrochemical technologies demands anion-conducting polymers that break the fundamental trade-offs between conductivity, stability, and swelling. Ion transport in these materials is a complex, emergent property that arises from the coupling of water dynamics, nanoscale morphology, and polymer chemistry across multiple length and time scales. In this talk, I will present a […]
Fold It. Stretch It. Build it. Shape it. Responsive Materials Meet Intelligence. Keynote Speakers: H. Jerry Qi Woodruff Endowed Professor George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Talk title: “Photocuring: grayscale digital light processing printing for pixel-level property manipulations” Jenny Sabin Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture Chair, Department […]
Contact, friction, and fracture are fundamental processes governing the emergent (mechanical) behaviors of various complex (material) systems, from as large as tectonic slip to as small as third-body wear. In this talk, we briefly discuss (1) challenges in understanding the (nonlinear) mechanics of these processes, specifically focusing on those designed into metamaterials, and (2) novel […]
