MIT Program in Polymers and Soft Matter (PPSM) Seminar

Join us this spring as we celebrate Day of Climate at the MIT Museum, a dynamic event dedicated to celebrating the innovative climate work being done at MIT and by passionate learners and educators who are leading work at schools and in their own communities. Inspired by the successful Day of AI, this event aims to bring together a community of like-minded individuals who are committed to addressing the pressing challenges of climate change. It will highlight the significant contributions of MIT researchers, educators, and students in the field of climate science and sustainability.Register for this in-person event!Beyond this event, Day of Climate is a broad new initiative dedicated to equipping K-12 learners and educators with the tools and knowledge to better understand climate change, its impacts, and potential solutions through free, concise, hands-on resources, activities, and curricula. Awarding nearly $125k in grants to support curriculum development to seven groups across the Institute, this effort unites the MIT community and educators, locally and globally, in empowering the next generation to take meaningful action on climate and sustainability challenges.On Wednesday, April 16, Day of Climate will bring together MIT faculty, educators, learners, and local community members to celebrate the incredible efforts of K-12 learners tackling climate change. The event will feature inspiring speakers, including Claudia Urrea, Executive Director of the MIT pK-12 Initiative, Chris Knittel, Director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, Pete Bouchard, NBC Boston’s award-winning chief meteorologist, Yashasvi Raj, a PhD student doing cutting edge research in climate science, and a panel of thoughtful educators and youth, providing insights into the latest climate research, innovative solutions, and effective advocacy strategies.Explore the complete agenda for the Day of Climate celebration at the MIT Museum.Save your seat for this in-person Day of Climate event!

Speaker: Wenkui Du (MIT)Title: Rigidity of ancient ovals in mean curvature flow.Abstract:We will discuss the classification of ancient noncollapsed flows as singularity models of mean curvature flow. In particular, I will discuss my recent joint work with Beomjun Choi and Jingze Zhu about spectral rigidity, stability and symmetry of the so-called $k$-ovals in general dimensions. These $k$-ovals belong to the family of ancient ovals (compact non-selfsimilar ancient noncollapsed flows), and are expected to coincide with all the ancient ovals by a recent work of Choi-Haslhofer.

Speaker: Yiannis Sakellaridis (Johns Hopkins University)Title: On the cotangent bundle of spherical varieties.Abstract: I will present a very simple-minded theorem, describing the regular locus of the cotangent bundle of a strongly tempered spherical variety as a "toric embedding'' of the group scheme of regular centralizers. This deepens work of Knop (who described this cotangent bundle up to codimension one), confirms an observation of V. Lafforgue, and can be fed into the argument of Hameister–Luo–Morissey to prove a version of the semiclassical/Dolbeault relative Langlands conjecture. Moreover, this theorem gives a more satisfactory picture about a mysterious symplectic vector space appearing in the dual hyperspherical variety. Part of ongoing joint work with Ben-Zvi and Venkatesh.

Talk Title: Geometric and Electronic Structural Contributions to Fe/O2 Reactivity: Correlations between Metalloenzyme and Heterogeneous CatalysisWebsite: https://web.stanford.edu/group/solomon/home.html

Please join us on Wednesday, April 16, 2025 for the Pierce Seminar at 4 PM in Room 1-131 with Prof. Yinhai Wang.Abstract Title: Transforming the Future of Transportation Safety and Mobility with Customized AI and Edge ComputingAbstract:We are facing severe challenges in both transportation safety and mobility despite decades of conventional solutions and substantial investments. There is a pressing demand for more effective and deployment-ready solutions, leveraging emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). In response to this need, the University of Washington’s Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) has dedicated itself to developing customized AI methods and edge computing tools to best serve the transportation needs. The award-winning Mobile Unit for Sensing Traffic (MUST) system, along with its machine learning-powered traffic sensing algorithms, exemplifies these efforts. In this presentation, the speaker will share his thoughts on the transformative potential of using customized AI and edge computing in enhancing transportation safety and mobility. Strategies for customizing edge systems to transportation tasks, including resource allocation, scenario-based customization, and the implementation of lightweight models, etc., and challenges associated with the development and implementation process will also be discussed.Bio:Dr. Yinhai Wang is a professor in transportation engineering at Civil and Environmental Engineering and adjunct professor at Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Washington (UW). He has served as director for Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), USDOT University Transportation Center for Federal Region 10, since 2012 and for Northwestern Tribal Technical Assistance Program Center since 2022, and Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC) since 2023. Dr. Wang was an elected governor for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) from 2011 through 2013 and served as the 2018-2019 president of the Transportation & Development Institute (T&DI) for American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He is currently chair for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Advanced Computing Applications Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), vice president for Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC), chair for the ASCE Center on Technical Advancement, co-editor-in-chief for the AI for Transportation Journal, and the Connected and Automated Transportation Special Section Editor for ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering Part A: Systems. His active research fields include traffic sensing, transportation safety, transportation data science, edge computing, traffic operations and simulation, smart urban mobility, and AI methods and applications. He is a professional engineer registered in Washington, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, a Distinguished Member of ASCE, and a fellow of both IEEE and ITE. He has been recognized by numerous awards, such as the 2023 ASCE Francis C. Turner award and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Innovation in Education Award for 2018.