At TED, Professor Aaswath Raman Talks About the Cold of Space as a Renewable Resource
Aaswath Raman, one of the newest members of the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, is using his background in optics and materials science to take an ancient idea and apply it to a pressing, modern-day problem: cooling. He spoke at this year’s TED conference in Vancouver, explaining how harnessing “radiative cooling” could be the […]
Machine Learning Researchers Try to Improve Working Conditions for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Workers
In the late 1700s, a Hungarian inventor built what appeared to be a chess-playing automaton, cloaked in Ottoman robes and a turban. The machine, known as the Mechanical Turk, impressed crowds and challenged opponents across Europe and the Americas. Eventually it was revealed that the Turk was not automated at all. Rather, a skilled chess […]
Paving the Way for Safer, Smaller Batteries and Fuel Cells
Research led by Karen I. Winey, TowerBrook Foundation Faculty Fellow, professor and Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, and Edward B. Trigg, then a doctoral student in her lab, introduces a new and versatile kind of solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) that has twice the proton conductivity of the current state-of-the-art material.
Science and Politics: A Q&A with Molly Sheehan
Molly Sheehan, postdoctoral researcher in Bioengineering, sat down with Penn Today to discuss her path towards becoming a scientist, what led her to run for office, and the changes she hopes to be able to make.
An Innovative Approach to Better Energy Storage
Led by Shu Yang, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, a Penn/Drexel research team has engineered a way to manipulate nanomaterials to stand up vertically on a scale that has potential for industrial applications.
GRASP’s Research Experience for Teachers Featured in NSF Video Showcase
Penn Engineering’s GRASP lab is committed to sharing its expertise in cutting-edge robotics with the wider world. In 2015, it received a National Science Foundation grant to conduct a Research Experience for Teachers program, in which Philadelphia middle school teachers spend a summer in the lab, learning aspects of robotics that they can then impart […]
Computer Networks that Help People Stay Sober
As a member of the World Well-Being Project, a research group at Penn that uses machine learning to enable computers to better understand people’s personalities and emotions, as well as their mental and physical health, Lyle Ungar is interested the way that users express themselves on social networks. The specific words that people employ in […]
Earthquakes at the Nanoscale
Robert Carpick collaborates with Cornell postdoctoral researcher Kaiwen Tian and Penn alumni David Goldsby to publish a paper in Physical Review Letters which attempts to tackle the devastation of earthquakes by investigating the laws of friction at the smallest possible scale, the nanoscale.
Penn Engineers Win Award for Paper on AI for Smart Buildings
Engineering graduate student Achin Jain, professors Rahul Mangharam and Manfred Morari, and alumnus Truong X. Nghiem won the Best Paper Award at the 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) 2018 for their work on bridging machine learning and control theory for physical systems. ICCPS is part of CPSWEEK, which is one of the […]
Amish Patel Receives ACS OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award
Amish Patel, Reliance Industries Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been selected to receive the OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the Computers in Chemistry (COMP) Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The award is designed to assist new faculty members in gaining visibility within the COMP community.