Thin plates are an elegant and versatile design platform that combine strength and efficiency. They appear in stately geodesic domes, workaday corrugated cargo containers and in countless natural settings, from leaves to cellular membranes. In each case, their mechanical response is derived not only from their composition but also from their patterning, such as corrugation […]
An increasing number of extreme events - including wildfires and hurricanes - are now being live-streamed online. These streams often emerge from the repurposing of existing infrastructure (such as smart doorbells), as well as from so-called 'influencers' producing social media content. In addition to generating large viewerships, streams have contributed to both fatalities (of streamers) […]
Abstract: During cardiovascular development, peristaltic contraction of the embryonic heart tube produces time-varying hemodynamic forces and pressure gradients across the atrioventricular canal. However, the relative importance of myocardial contraction and hemodynamic force to modulate cardiovascular morphogenesis in the non-Newtonian flow regime remains poorly understood. By developing the 4-D light-sheet fluorescent microscope and post-imaging machine-learning algorithms, […]
In recent years, there has been growing interest in applying neural networks to the data-driven approximation of partial differential equations (PDEs). In this talk, we present GenCFD, a generative AI algorithm for fast, accurate, and robust statistical computation of three-dimensional turbulent fluid flows. On a set of challenging fluid flows, GenCFD provides an accurate approximation […]
Motivated by the need to better understand and predict exchange processes between the land surface and the atmosphere and their impact on weather and climate, the past decades have seen substantial efforts devoted to studying atmospheric turbulence within and above natural and built environments. The current understanding of such a flow phenomenon is largely rooted […]
From autonomous vehicles navigating busy intersections to quadrupeds deployed in household environments, robots must operate safely and efficiently around people in uncertain and unstructured situations. However, today's robots still struggle to robustly handle low-probability events without becoming overly conservative. In this talk, I will discuss how planning in the joint space of physical and information […]
Biofilms are viscoelastic materials. Biofilm viscoelasticity is an evolved property of these communities, and the production of multiple extracellular polymeric slime components appears to be a mechanism to ensure the development of biofilms with complex viscoelastic properties. However the importance of this attribute to the survival and persistence of these microbial communities is yet to […]
Preventing injury and restoring mobility following injury, both musculoskeletal and neuromuscular, is challenging. In recent years, the fields of biomechanics and clinical rehabilitation have informed the development of wearable devices and assessment tools that aid in rehabilitation and in maintaining mobility. Wearable exosystems are assistive devices that can target weakness in a specific joint or […]
Transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) has the promise of modulating deep brain structures with small focal spots. Early work by Fry (Science 1958) in modulating the visual system is reproducible and yielding valuable insights due to the extensive knowledge of the visual system and easy accessibility to study it. There is a multitude of new studies […]
Robots are traditionally designed with fixed physical hardware and control policies that make them specialized for repetitive tasks and structured environments. This talk discusses foundational work toward robots that "evolve on demand," morphing their bodies and adapting their behaviors to accommodate multiple tasks in diverse environments. First, I will introduce robotic structures made from stiffness-changing […]
Efficient and resilient coordination among autonomous agents plays an important role in various domains such as energy management, robotic swarms, autonomous vehicles and beyond. As these systems grow in complexity and scale, the challenge of achieving optimal coordination becomes increasingly difficult. The first part of the talk will focus on tackling scalability issues by leveraging […]
Biological wastewater treatment systems are ideal models with which to study "eco-systems biology" of microbial communities. Polyphosphate accumulating bacteria are used world-wide to remove phosphorus from wastewater but the most abundant phylogenetically defined group (Candidatus Accumulibacter) cannot be cultured in isolation. I will describe advances in our understanding of Accumulibacter ecophysiology based on comparative genomics […]
