Registration is now open for the C4R26 Conference! September 28-30 at the University of Pennsylvania campus. Most conferences are about sharing completed science. The Community for Rigor conference is about improving the science you'll do next. C4R26 is FREE and open to students, researchers, educators, publishers, and anyone interested in helping build a stronger, more reliable foundation […]
Abstract: Across the Internet, mistaken and malicious routing announcements impose significant costs on users and network operators. To make routing announcements more reliable and secure, Internet coordination bodies have encouraged network operators to adopt the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (“RPKI”) framework. Despite this encouragement, RPKI’s adoption rates are low, especially in North America. This talk […]
In this talk, I will cover two problems, both about the structure a small obstacle leaves in its wake. In the first problem, hydrogel posts photopatterned in a microchannel release solute into a flow. A fluorescent solute lets us image the concentration boundary layer directly; an invisible solute leaves its record in the suspended colloids, […]
A continuous-time quantum walk on a graph is given by the unitary matrix exp(-itA) where A is the adjacency matrix of the graph. This defines a Schrodinger evolution with A as the Hamiltonian. In quantum computing, quantum walk is important for designing fast quantum algorithms (such as Grover search) and useful quantum protocols (such as […]
In this talk, we take the position that agent security must be approached as a systems problem: the AI model powering the agent must be treated as an untrusted component, and security invariants must be enforced at the system level. Through this lens, efforts to increase model robustness (the dominant viewpoint in the ML community) […]
This presenter is one of the winners of the 2026 GRASP vote for internal PhD or postdoc SFI Speakers! This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Modern learning methods offer powerful flexibility for robotics challenges involving complex physical and geometric structure, but often struggle to […]
Abstract: In this work, we investigate the effect of the charge-block length on the chain conformation and phase behavior of peptide polyampholytes (PAs) with equal numbers of cationic and anionic ionizable monomers. Peptide PAs were produced using solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS), which enables precise control of the molecular weight, monomer sequence, and chain tacticity. Using […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. X. Sherry Liu are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Vincent Jin. Title: "Modeling- and Remodeling-based Bone Formation: Dynamics, Composition, and Nanomechanical Properties" Advisor: Dr. X. Sherry Liu Date: Thursday, October 1, 2026 Time: 10:00 AM EST Location: John Morgan Class of […]
The extremely rapid adoption of organic LEDs in both mobile and television display markets has been driven by their ultrahigh efficiency, large color gamut, thin form factors and long lifetimes. But this successful experience has only given rise to the question: what's next for organic electronics? To be sure, there are other opportunities waiting in […]
Autonomous agents must accomplish complex tasks while interacting with uncertain opponents and coordinating with teammates. This dissertation develops methods for robust and adaptive decision-making through opponent modeling, adversarial policy synthesis, and learning guided by temporal logic task specifications. It also introduces a method that attributes shared safety costs to individual agents to support safe cooperation. […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania along with Drs. Robert Mauck and Sarah Gullbrand are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Austin Jenk. Title: "Engineering Tunable Therapeutic Release Across the Spectrum of Post-Traumatic Osteoarthritis" Advisor: Drs. Robert Mauck and Sarah Gullbrand Date: Monday, October 5, 2026 Time: 11:00 AM EST […]
Mechanical metamaterials achieve extraordinary physical properties through their internal geometric architectures. While traditional metamaterials are limited by fixed designs, multistable reprogrammable metamaterials can modify these properties post-fabrication and morph into different shapes. However, existing tunable metamaterials often require continuous energy input, rely on global volumetric deformations, or necessitate complex actuation networks. In this talk, I […]
We explore the nucleation and propagation of cracks within a transparent polydimenthylsiloxane elastomer using the “poker-chip” specimen. This is accomplished not just through the usual macroscopic load and displacement data, but also with synchronized optical images at high spatial and adequate temporal resolution to resolve the evolution of the failure processes. This is augmented with […]
AI in Health: Foundation Models for Radiology, Cardiology and Autism Diagnosis This talk explores how AI can transform medical data into clinically meaningful predictions and assessments across radiology, cardiology, and autism diagnosis. I will begin with foundation models for chest radiology, highlighting methods that transform free-text reports into structured clinical facts, enable interpretable query-based classification, […]
Imitation learning provides a simple recipe for learning complex behavior: instead of searching for bespoke exploratory policies or solving challenging reward design problems, one can collect expert demonstrations and apply supervised learning. While this paradigm has existed for many decades, it has seen an explosion of recent interest due to advances in robotics and applications […]
Have questions about anything or everything water related? Come visit our table to ask us water experts from Penn and local community partners anything you want to know about water, water pollution, and how water pollution is inextricably connected to our changing climate. We will have a microplastics visualization demonstration including some real samples collected […]
Please join Penn Washington, the Penn Public Service and Policy Initiative (PSPI), and the Penn Engineering Green Team for a conversation on how leaders drive climate policy at the local, state, and federal levels. Former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, inaugural PSPI Impact Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and former […]
Humanity is faced with the daunting task of meeting our ever-growing demand for resources without causing catastrophic climate change. If we are to eventually establish a sustainable society, we must learn to synthesize useful chemicals, fuels, and materials from readily abundant small molecules using renewable forms of energy. Taking inspiration from ecology, my group is […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722 Extragradient methods are a fundamental class of algorithms for solving min-max optimization problems and variational inequalities. While the classical theory is largely developed under smoothness and other relatively restrictive assumptions, many problems arising in modern machine learning call for analysis in weaker regularity regimes and in stochastic large-scale settings. In this talk, we […]
When thinking about climate and sustainability, scholars and research institutions must hold two truths about artificial intelligence side-by-side: AI is undoubtedly catalyzing powerful new ways of understanding phenomena that affect the health of our planet and ourselves. And, the data centers that support AI technology present an unprecedented drain on our energy and water resources. […]
Penn students are invited to pitch their boldest sustainability ideas in a live, “Shark Tank”-style competition for a chance to raise visibility of your project and receive mentorship towards a Green Fund application. The Green Fund provides funding to seed innovative projects that improve Penn’s environmental performance and advance the University’s Climate and Sustainability Action […]
With the advancement of technology, there is an increasing demand for multifunctional materials that combine optical, electronic, mechanical, and ionic properties. Hybrid metal halide semiconductors (MHS) have emerged as promising candidates for a wide range of optoelectronic applications, including solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), photodetectors, and lasers. These materials exhibit a unique set of finely […]
Penn AI, the Office of the Government and Community Affairs, and Perry World House invite you to a fireside chat hosted by Dave Meaney. Join us for a fireside chat with U.S. Congressman Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ-5) and David Meaney, Penn's Vice Provost for Research, on the future of AI policy. Congressman Gottheimer, a founding co-chair […]
Particle suspensions can fracture into intricate patterns as they are pushed out of equilibrium. We probe the fracture and relaxation characteristics of dense aqueous cornstarch suspensions that exhibit discontinuous shear-thickening behavior. Air injection into three-dimensional bulk suspensions can lead to smooth bubbles that rise upwards under the action of buoyancy or to sharp fractures that […]
MathDuels: A Self-Play Benchmark That Grows As frontier language models attain near-ceiling performance on static mathematical benchmarks, existing evaluations are increasingly unable to differentiate model capabilities, largely because they cast models solely as solvers of fixed problem sets. I will present MathDuels, a self-play benchmark in which models occupy dual roles: each authors math problems […]
Is Your Robot Policy Better Than Mine? Rigorous Methods to Evaluate (and Intervene on) Policy Synthesis Open-world robots require complex, analytically opaque learned architectures to process high-dimensional exteroceptive perception into actionable representations of their environment. This reliance necessitates a critical tradeoff: to imbue the needed capacity to make the robot performant, the roboticist concedes the […]
Recent developments have underscored how rapidly and unexpectedly AI risks can evolve. These range from deliberate misuse by bad actors to unintended behavior by AI systems. Their growing ability to act autonomously and coordinate with other AI agents poses new challenges for human oversight. Penn AI is convening a panel to examine the many dimensions […]
Jiayuan Mao aims to build intelligent agents that continually learn, reason, and plan: agents that can answer queries, infer human intentions, and pursue long-horizon goals spanning hours to days. In this talk, she will describe a general framework for learning and reasoning with neuro-symbolic concepts. Drawing inspirations from theories and studies in cognitive science, neuro-symbolic […]
This event will be held in-person in Levine 512 and virtually via Zoom. ABSTRACT Learned models such as VGGT now recover camera poses and 3D structure directly from images, a task that once required hand-designed geometric pipelines. Recent community discussions connect this progress to the Bitter Lesson, which holds that general methods eventually outperform methods […]
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722 Classically, convergence guarantees for gradient descent (GD) require that the step size be sufficiently small compared to the local curvature ("sharpness") of the objective. This "small-step" condition is routinely violated in the practical training of deep learning models, wherein the favoured "large-step" GD is observed to converge with intriguing oscillatory dynamics and an […]
Unmanned ground and aerial systems hold promise for critical applications, including search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and autonomous delivery. Real-world deployment in safety-critical settings, however, remains challenging due to GPS-denied operation, perceptual uncertainty, energy constraints, and the need for safe trajectory planning in dynamic unknown environments. This talk presents recent advances in planning, control, and […]
This will be an in-person event ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Robot safety is a nuanced concept. We commonly equate safety with collision-avoidance. However, when considering the possibility of generalist robots -- one robot that can do "anything" -- we need to expand our notion of safety. For example, a manipulator should understand […]
In this talk I will overview several different surface design strategies that can be utilized to manipulate and typically minimize the adhesion of solid foulants. The specific foulant of interest for this talk will mainly be ice, although the design principles apply to any hard fouling substance. I will first discuss the effect of utilizing […]
Abstract: Nanoscale confinement and surface interactions offer powerful means of controlling polymer behavior. This dissertation investigates how these factors govern polymer replacement, molecular sorption, and material stability using densely packed silica nanoparticles as a tunable experimental platform. Sequential infiltration experiments reveal selective, directional replacement of one polymer by another, governed by relative surface affinity and […]
Predictive models of the world are fundamental to robotics — from planning, to evaluation, to reinforcement learning. However, despite decades of investment in physics-based simulation, we do not have models that can endow robots with general manipulation capabilities. In this talk, I will discuss the potential of action-conditioned video generation models to serve as general-purpose […]
The recent autonomous solution to the Navier-Stokes millennium problem was an extraordinary breakthrough. Yet, equally remarkable is how the global community accepted this solution without traditional, years-long peer review. This speed was possible because the proof included an autoformalized Lean certificate, allowing it to be mechanically verified. Lean was the foundational trust substrate beneath the […]
Join us as we launch the Schlein Center for Cybersecurity at Penn Engineering and bring together leading experts from academia, government, and industry to examine the future of cybersecurity. The event will feature opening remarks, faculty presentations, panel discussions, and keynote addresses exploring the evolving cybersecurity landscape and the challenges and opportunities ahead.
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. ABSTRACT Physics provides a powerful framework not only for describing the world we observe, but also for predicting how it will evolve. Advances in graphics, simulation, perception, and learning have made it increasingly possible to construct and simulate complex […]
Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/99074346805?pwd=cm5pNFo3YnZtNGt2QTFhZ05mQTBFQT09 Meeting ID: 990 7434 6805 Passcode: 519615 Abstract TBA
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Rahim Rizi are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Mostafa Ismail. Title: "Advanced Imaging and Artificial Intelligence for Quantitative Assessment in Lung Transplantation" Advisor: Dr. Rahim Rizi Date: Friday, October 23, 2026 Time: 10:00 AM EST Location: Donnor-Grice Auditorium (HUP 2nd floor) […]
This will be an in-person event ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Human cognition is implemented in a physical system (our brain and body) with limited resources . Perception, memory, and decision-making therefore must reflect smart trade-offs between performance and the associated resource costs of acquiring, representing, and maintaining information. I will present a […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Lukasz Bugaj are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Dennis Huang. Title: "Mining and engineering of protein receptors for non-invasive control of biological dynamics" Advisor: Dr. Lukasz Bugaj Date: Monday, October 26, 2026 Time: 9:00 AM EST Location: KRB 252 The public […]
Abstract: TBA Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/99074346805?pwd=cm5pNFo3YnZtNGt2QTFhZ05mQTBFQT09 Meeting ID: 990 7434 6805 Passcode: 519615
Abstract: In real-world applications of SNARKs, non-native arithmetic is a key bottleneck. It introduces large overheads, and proof system designers often resort to non-standard SNARK-friendly hash-functions or other means like elliptic curve cycles to mitigate its costs. Besides performance concerns, non-native circuit arithmetization is also a major cause of implementation errors. In a collection of […]
Place a drop of water on an icy surface: it crystallizes at the point of contact, and a slow ice front steadily grows upwards. Place a bubble instead, and a burst of ice crystals erupts across its interface, far from where it touches the surface. Now, place a collection of dew drops: they start ‘talking’ […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Drs. Carl H. June & Neil C. Sheppard are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Abdulla Berjis. Title: "Improving NK cell therapies for solid tumors" Advisor: Drs. Carl H. June & Neil C. Sheppard Date: Tuesday October 27, 2026 Time: 12:00 PM EST […]
Power grids must be managed at greater speed, scale, and physical fidelity to enable decarbonization and improve resilience. Methods from machine learning (ML) have the potential to play an important role by providing fast, scalable approximations for foundational power system optimization problems, but often struggle to enforce hard physical constraints, maintain robustness in the face […]
Abstract: Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life. For many proteins, such as enzymes, the protein’s amino acid sequence specifies a stably folded structure that determines function. In contrast, intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are dynamic and do not adopt a stable fold. Modern computational and experimental approaches, such as AlphaFold and cryo-electron microscopy, have enabled […]
Fouling affects every industry using water, but is especially problematic for anthropogenic marine structures in contact with ocean water. Anti-fouling coatings are a $10 billion industry currently dominated by biocidal copper which function by releasing copper ions to kill microbes. While effective, these are increasingly being regulated or banned due to their ecological harm. New […]
Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/99074346805?pwd=cm5pNFo3YnZtNGt2QTFhZ05mQTBFQT09 Meeting ID: 990 7434 6805 Passcode: 519615 Abstract TBA
This will be an in-person event ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. ABSTRACT Robot-assisted surgery gives surgeons enhanced dexterity and precision, but every motion still requires direct human control. That leads to long procedures and outcomes that vary with operator skill. My lab works to close this gap by turning teleoperated systems into autonomous ones. […]
