Title:A Journey from Academia to Industry Abstract:How I ended up working on the Department of Defense projects. Sharing my past research experiences from academia to industry to DOD projects. I started my journey as a physicist set for academia but discovered other possibilities that changed my way of thinking. During the seminar I will share my decade and a half of research experiences and discuss not so conventional paths to research. I will discuss my work as a Materials Scientist for optics and photonics applications. Speaker:Alket MertiriPrinciple Member, Technical Staff, Draper Bio:Alket Mertiri is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Draper. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Mathematics from Boston University concentrating on condensed‐matter physics and applied mathematics. He then pursued graduate studies in Materials Science and Engineering at Boston University. His research focused on ultrafast infrared spectroscopy and photothermal microscopy, leveraging quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) and infrared detection to enable label‐free biochemical sensing and imaging. Beyond his research, Mertiri took an active role in science advocacy. While serving as President of the Boston University chapter of the Optical Society of America (OSA), he participated in a visit to Washington D.C. to meet members of Congress and advocate for sustained funding in science and engineering. Host: Professor Ulkuhan Guler

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Neural Certificates for Safe Robotic System Planning and Control Abstract: Achieving safety, scalability, and high performance in complex systems, such as multi-agent systems (MAS) control, is a central challenge in many real-world robotic deployments due to its computational complexity as a large-scale constrained optimal control problem. To address this, we introduce a novel graph control barrier function (GCBF) as a core tool for large-scale distributed safe control, which guarantees safety for arbitrarily large MAS with only local observations. For MAS with known dynamic models, we present a self-supervised learning framework that can jointly learn GCBF and distributed control policies that consider actuation limits. For MAS with unknown dynamics, we discuss how to blend GCBF in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to achieve high-performance and safe distributed policies. Bio: Chuchu Fan is an Associate Professor (pre-tenure) in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. Her research group, the Realm at MIT, works on developing computational tools that integrate rigorous mathematics into machine learning and AI for the design, analysis, and verification of safe, large-scale, and complex systems. Chuchu is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, an ONR YIP Award, and the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Looking for a way to make your day less stressful and more mindful...take some much-needed time for yourself and join us for Mindful Thursdays! Drop-in meditation sessions are open to the entire WPI community, and no experience is necessary. A certified meditation teacher will offer guided meditations appropriate for both beginners as well as experienced meditators. People can join in person or via zoom. Mindful Thursdays: 2:15PM to 2:35PM Center for Well-Being, Daniels Hall 102E Zoom: https://wpi.zoom.us/j/186050714 Each Friday an email will be sent out to the group called Mindfulness Tools To-Go which will include information about meditations, poems shared during the week, and mindful resources. If you have questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact Robin Benoit, rbenoit@wpi.edu

Global Asia Hub invites Dr. Andrew Erickson, Visiting Scholar Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Prof of Strategy,China Maritime Studies Institute, US Naval War College to give a presentation discussing China's sea forces and XI seeks to use them in a time of dangerous shifting power dynamics. China under Xi Jinping has become a great maritime power, possessing the world's largest fleets numerically in every maritime category.