School of Engineering & Applied Science

Penn Professors Lead Call for Ethical Framework for New 'Mind Control' Technologies

As interventions for mental illnesses and neurological disorders are becoming increasingly powerful, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, American University and Duke University are calling for new safeguards to guide treatments and protect patients.  

Evan Lerner, Ali Sundermier, Bryan Roth, Rebecca Basu

Teaching Robots to ‘Feel with Their Eyes’

An engineering Ph.D. student is leading a project that builds up a database of surfaces so that robots may better identify what objects are made of and how to handle them.

Ali Sundermier

Penn Collaboration Produces Surprising Insights Into the White Spots on Butterfly Wings

A collaboration between biologists and materials scientists at the University of Pennsylvania is yielding new insights into the wings of the “skipper butterfly” in the Costa Rican rainforest. What they learn could lead to technological advancements in systems ranging from power-efficient computer displays to sensors to energy efficient buildings, windows and vehicles.

Katherine Unger Baillie, Ali Sundermier

Penn Professor Refutes Groupthink, Proving That Wisdom of Crowds Can Prevail

Anyone following forecasting polls leading up to the 2016 election likely believed Hillary Clinton would become the 45th president of the United States. Although this opinion was the consensus among most political-opinion leaders and media, something clearly went wrong with these prediction tools.

Katherine Unger Baillie



In the News


Philadelphia Inquirer

Comcast’s Sports Complex plan for South Philly would make our city less livable

In an Op-Ed, Vukan R. Vuchic of the School of Engineering and Applied Science says that Philadelphia should make transit more accessible rather than striving to accommodate more cars.

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Big Think

Can we stop AI hallucinations? And do we even want to?

Chris Callison-Burch of the School of Engineering and Applied Science says that auto-regressive generation can make it difficult for language learning models to perform fact-based or symbolic reasoning.

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CNET

How the solar eclipse will affect solar panels and the grid

Benjamin Lee of the School of Engineering and Applied Science says that the electrical grid will have to figure out how to match supply and demand during brief windows where the energy source goes away.

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The New York Times

Can your personal medical devices be recycled?

A lab at the School of Engineering and Applied Science led the development of a COVID test made from bacterial cellulose, an organic compound.

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CNBC

Students can soon major in AI at this Ivy League university—it’ll prepare them for ‘jobs that don’t yet exist’

The Raj and Neera Singh Program in Artificial Intelligence at Penn will be the first AI undergraduate engineering major at an Ivy League school, led by George Pappas of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

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