Events Listing

Join us next week at three unique design shows staged by students in ECE and ME senior design projects, EE 1301 (Intro. to Computing systems with Internet-of-Things lab), and CSE 1012 (Project-based Inquiry).

Scientist Dawn Sepehr at ECE Spring 2025 Colloquium

Dawn Sepehr, AI Applied Scientist at Amazon, explores the critical balancing act between rapid AI advancement and responsible implementation in the era of Large Language Models. As AI technologies transform from traditional statistical approaches to complex foundation models with emergent capabilities, developers and organizations face unprecedented ethical challenges around bias, fairness, explainability, and governance. This talk examines the multidimensional framework needed for responsible AI development, highlighting human-in-the-loop methodologies and practical strategies that allow innovation to flourish while maintaining ethical standards.

Author Meghan O'Gieblyn

The rise of generative AI has destabilized the way we typically think about the relationship between language and thought. Given that large language models can produce cogent, even creative text via statistical mimesis, many have asked whether human "output" is really original. A number of writers, artists, and philosophers (many writing long before the age of AI) have explored both the creative possibilities and the ethical risks that arise when language becomes uncoupled from conscious attention.

The event is co-sponsored by Computer Science & Engineering; Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature; Electrical & Computer Engineering; History of Science, Technology & Medicine; Philosophy; Religious Studies; the Institute of Linguistics; the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science; and the Center for Faith & Learning at Anselm House.

Professor Pulickel M. Ajayan at ECE Spring 2025 Colloquium

The ternary phase space consisting of boron, nitrogen and carbon shows a number of thermodynamically stable phases of binary and ternary compositions. There has been significant amount of work in the past on optimizing conditions to grow these phases and understanding their stability. This talk will focus on some of these interesting materials that have compositions of C, BN, CN and BCN. The effort in synthesizing hexagonal as well cubic phases of these compositions will be discussed with the goal of achieving 2D and 3D structures with specific applications in mind. 

Professor Onur Bakiner at ECE Spring 2025 Colloquium

This talk is about efforts to get AI right. Building upon AI scholarship in science and technology studies, technology law, business ethics, and computer science, I list proposed solutions to AI-related problems around the world. I present theoretical debates and empirical evidence for how and how well technical solutions, business self-regulation, and legal regulation, which stand out as three toolkits to govern AI, work. This idealized governance model will not work seamlessly, however. Each component of this governance scheme has weaknesses – some more than others. Getting AI governance right cannot be disentangled from local and global struggles for justice and equality. The people who are negatively affected by those decisions are denied a seat at the table. It is true that AI creates new problems and amplifies existing ones, but deep down, where AI fails is where human societies fail. The long-term health of the relationship between technology and society depends on whether ordinary people are empowered to participate in making informed decisions to govern the future of technology – AI included. To put simply, the problem is disempowerment and alienation, and the solution is people’s informed participation.

Dr. Shintaro Sato, Fellow, SVP, Head of Quantum Laboratory, Fujitsu Limited, Japan

Dr. Shintaro Sato will be speaking at the joint ME/PHYS/ECE/CS&E Seminar.

Dr. Shintaro Sato is Fellow, SVP, Head of Quantum Laboratory at Fujitsu Research, Fujitsu Limited, Japan. He concurrently serves as Deputy Director of the RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Center. Leading research at the Quantum Laboratory, he oversees all aspects of quantum computing technology, from device and platform to software and applications.

In October 2023, Fujitsu, in collaboration with RIKEN, released a computer - a first for a Japanese company. Fujitsu and its collaborators received the Prime Minister’s Award as part of the 53rd Japan Industrial Technology Awards in 2024 for successfully developing a high-performance computing platform leveraging this 64-qubit computer.

His laboratory also collaborates with TU Delft in the Netherlands on diamond-spin qubit technology. Prior to his work in quantum computing, he conducted research on post-silicon devices using carbon nanotubes and graphene, receiving several research awards, including the JSAP (the Japan Society of Applied Physics) Fellow Award in 2018. From 2010 to 2014, he led a group at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, working on "green nanoelectronics" funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science through the First Program.

He also held a concurrent position at Semiconductor Leading-Edge Technologies, Inc. from 2006 to 2010. He joined Fujitsu after receiving his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2001, and earned his MS in Science and Engineering (Physics) from the University of Tsukuba in 1990. His research interests include nanomaterials, nanoelectronics, and quantum computing. 

Professor K. C. Fong at ECE Spring 2025 Colloquium

Quantum science and technology hold the promise to deepen our understanding of the universe and deliver groundbreaking technical innovations. The opportunity also poses a grand challenge to today’s scientists and engineers because initializing, controlling, manipulating, and measuring the quantum information while maintaining the coherence and entanglement can be very difficult. Therefore, successfully achieving breakthroughs would require an interdisciplinary approach that leverages resources from various disciplines to forge new pathways which cannot be defined by a singular field of study.

In this talk, I will share my interdisciplinary adventure through quantum material and quantum device landscapes. We will start from the study of fundamental characteristics of Dirac and topological materials, discussing first how their remarkable properties manifest in Josephson junctions, and then focus on the material physics that we can exploit to invent single-photon detectors, that can operate as optical interconnects for cryogenic computing, probe the quantum state of the photon, and contribute to the search of the dark matter axion.

We will further explore how to utilize the novel properties of the two-dimensional van der Waals materials to miniaturize qubits and develop quantum-noise-limited amplifiers. And

Finally, we will turn around to apply what we learn from quantum sensing to study the pairing symmetry of novel superconductivities, including the magic-angle-twisted graphene and topological Weyl superconductors. We will end by elucidating how to harness the kinetic inductance of these novel superconductors for future flight-missions to explore planetary science and the origins of life.

Covert attack synthesis and mitigation over nonlinear dynamics

Hypothesis testing problems lie at the core of the interface between control and information theory. In this talk, we will highlight canonical CPS security challenges that require contributions from both the control and information theory communities.
We begin with a simple "GPS spoofing game" to analyze the competition between an attacker, who tries to covertly misguide a vehicle into an unsafe region, and a detector, who tries to identify the attack based on the vehicle’s observed trajectory. We derive the unique saddle point of the game. We also analyze the exponents of the type II error in the finite data length regime.
We then extend our analysis to nonlinear dynamics. We show that the zero-sum game between the attacker and the controller can be naturally formulated as the so-called minimax KL control problem. We derive a variational characterization of the saddle-point policies and derive Monte Carlo algorithms to compute them numerically.

Ferroelectric devices, circuits and architectures for AI hardware design 

This presentation will discuss the recent progresses on doped HfO2 based ferroelectric devices and their applications towards AI on-chip acceleration: 1) fundamental device physics and variability of silicon channel ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET), and a compute-in-memory prototype chip taped-out via Global Foundries 28nm shuttle ; 2) a new concept on ferroelectric non-volatile capacitor (nvCap) for “charge-domain” compute-in-memory for improved energy efficiency; 3) back-end-of-line (BEOL) compatible amorphous oxide channel FeFET for monolithic 3D integrated compute-in-memory architecture, featuring ferroelectric gated routers as reconfigurable interconnects to support versatile AI models. 

Steering diffusion models for next-gen AI

Diffusion models are revolutionizing generative AI with unmatched capabilities in representing complex data—images, videos, 3D structures, and scientific phenomena. This talk examines their transformative impact on AI’s future, focusing on NVIDIA's pioneering role. We explore plug-and-play methods for steering foundational diffusion models to solve complex downstream tasks, including guidance and score distillation sampling. We also discuss integrating reinforcement learning with diffusion models for reward-based training to develop even more powerful generative AI systems.