School of Engineering & Applied Science

Yumin Gao, Leo Li, Minhal Dhanjy, Darsham Bhosale, Kateryna Kharenko and Ryan Goethals (clockwise from top left) pose with their prototypes and trophies.

Scrap metal-powered lights win Y-Prize 2020

The winning team of this year’s Y-Prize, an invention competition in which entrants are challenged to pitch an innovative business plan for a technology developed at Penn Engineering, Metal Light, proposes technology to provide illumination for houses not connected to electrical grids.

Penn Today Staff ・

Seven student faces and the symbol of the Thouron Award with the British and American flags

Penn announces seven 2020 Thouron Award winners

Four seniors and three recent alumni have won a Thouron Award to pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom. Each scholarship winner receives tuition for as long as two years, as well as travel and living stipends, to earn a graduate degree.

Louisa Shepard , Aaron Olson ・

View of white garments hanging at the Designs for Different Futures exhibit, with a white shirt on a stand and a futuristic wheelchair and mechanical upright walking device on display.

Designs for what the future can be

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Designs for Different Futures” exhibition includes contributions and installations from several Penn faculty and alumni who seek to answer questions about what the not-so-distant future may look like.



In the News


The New York Times

Mapping the social network of coronavirus

PIK Professor Duncan Watts spoke about the limits of predictive modeling in confronting the spread of disease. “It may seem like a small thing at the time, but after the fact you say, ‘Oh yeah, that was hugely important,’” he said of the unexpected factors.

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Vox.com

This AI breakthrough in antibiotics might one day save your life

César de la Fuente of the School of Engineering and Applied Science commented on new MIT research that might speed up antibiotic discovery. “I think it’s a breakthrough in a field of much unmet need,” he said. “After all, no new classes of antibiotics have been discovered for decades. This one is definitely structurally different from conventional antibiotics.”

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WHYY (Philadelphia)

Can algorithms help judges make fair decisions?

Michael Kearns of the School of Engineering and Applied Science said algorithms force us to be more detailed in our decision-making. “You should never expect machine learning to do something for free that you didn’t explicitly ask it to do for you, and you should never expect it to avoid behavior that you want it to avoid that you didn’t tell it explicitly to avoid,” he said.

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Mashable.com

Experts warn smartphone voting is ‘extremely risky,’ yet here it comes

Matt Blaze of the School of Engineering and Applied Science weighed in on a Washington state district’s plans to implement smartphone voting. “This extremely risky decision runs counter to the findings of the authoritative National Academies ‘Securing the Vote’ study, which represents the consensus of experts,” he said.

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The Atlantic

What your Facebook posts say about your mental health

Sharath Chandra Guntuku of the Center for Digital Health and Lyle Ungar of the School of Engineering and Applied Science spoke about a study they authored that measured loneliness in Twitter posts.

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