7 events found.
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Sunday, November 16, 2025
No events on this day.
Monday, November 17, 2025
No events on this day.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
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November 18, 2025 -MEAM Seminar: “Multiplying the Coolness of Gels: Messy Networks, Double Networks, and More”
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November 18, 2025 -ESE Fall Seminar – “Developing Custom Portable Low-Field MRI for Point-of-Care Imaging”
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November 18, 2025 -Penn AI Presents: “How Brains and Machines Solve the Binding Problem”
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November 18, 2025 -CIS Seminar: “Diffusion Generative Models for Non-Euclidean Data”
MEAM Seminar: “Multiplying the Coolness of Gels: Messy Networks, Double Networks, and More”
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 […]
ESE Fall Seminar – “Developing Custom Portable Low-Field MRI for Point-of-Care Imaging”
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 […]
Penn AI Presents: “How Brains and Machines Solve the Binding Problem”
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 […]
CIS Seminar: “Diffusion Generative Models for Non-Euclidean Data”
As a major powerhorse for generative AI, diffusion models have demonstrated great successes in Euclidean spaces, such as for generating images and videos. This talk, on the other hand, will focus on a more nascent aspect, namely non-Euclidean diffusion models. One can for example consider the generative modeling of data that are discrete, living on […]
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
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November 19, 2025 -MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Mechanical Behavior and Fracture of Fibrous Materials at Large Deformations”
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November 19, 2025 -ASSET Seminar: “Testing AI’s Implicit World Models”
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November 19, 2025 -Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Wei Wang, University of Wisconsin–Madison, “Toward Advanced Autonomy in Complex Aquatic Environments”
MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Mechanical Behavior and Fracture of Fibrous Materials at Large Deformations”
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 […]
ASSET Seminar: “Testing AI’s Implicit World Models”
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 […]
Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Wei Wang, University of Wisconsin–Madison, “Toward Advanced Autonomy in Complex Aquatic Environments”
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 […]
Thursday, November 20, 2025
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November 20, 2025 -MSE PhD Thesis Defense: “Rheology and Clogging Study of Filamentous Suspensions: Bridging Microscopic Dynamics and Macroscopic Behaviors”
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November 20, 2025 -MSE Seminar: “Building Cyberinfrastructure for Advancing Laboratories of the Future”
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November 20, 2025 -FOLDS seminar: Function Space Perspectives on Neural Networks
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November 20, 2025 -MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Exploring Self-Assembly of 2D Materials: Insights from Graphene Auto-Kirigami”
MSE PhD Thesis Defense: “Rheology and Clogging Study of Filamentous Suspensions: Bridging Microscopic Dynamics and Macroscopic Behaviors”
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 […]
MSE Seminar: “Building Cyberinfrastructure for Advancing Laboratories of the Future”
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 […]
FOLDS seminar: Function Space Perspectives on Neural Networks
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 […]
MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Exploring Self-Assembly of 2D Materials: Insights from Graphene Auto-Kirigami”
In nature, thin sheets bend, fold, and curve to create functional three-dimensional forms—from insect wings to leaves and flower petals. Over the past decades, such behavior has inspired engineered systems ranging from soft robotics to deployable electronics. Extending these ideas to atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene opens new opportunities: these materials can […]
Friday, November 21, 2025
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November 21, 2025 -Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Jie Tan, Google DeepMind, “Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World”
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November 21, 2025 -ESE Guest Seminar – “The Nonlinear Small-Gain Theory for Networks and Control”
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November 21, 2025 -ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “On Riccati Equations in Nonconvex Optimization”
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November 21, 2025 -PICS Colloquium: Macroscopic stochastic thermodynamics with Massimiliano Esposito [VIRTUAL]
Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Jie Tan, Google DeepMind, “Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World”
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) […]
ESE Guest Seminar – “The Nonlinear Small-Gain Theory for Networks and Control”
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 […]
ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “On Riccati Equations in Nonconvex Optimization”
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 […]
PICS Colloquium: Macroscopic stochastic thermodynamics with Massimiliano Esposito [VIRTUAL]
This speaker event is virtual, but will be screened in PICS 534 with refreshments. Equilibrium thermodynamics emerges from equilibrium statistical mechanics as the most likely behavior of a system in the macroscopic limit. Over the last two decades, significant progress has been made in formulating statistical mechanics for small systems operating far-from-equilibrium. The resulting theory […]
Saturday, November 22, 2025
No events on this day.