These trainings are divided into a 101- and 201-level and will be offered on a termly basis in Stratton Hall 311. Both trainings will include creating an action plan and discovering new resources for continued learning. Please contact Lauren Feldman (they/she) at diversity@wpi.edu with any questions or accommodations requests. All are welcome to attend! 101: Learn about identities, pronouns, and how to advocate for your students and colleagues. A-Term: Wednesday, September 10, 2:00-3:30pm ET Zoom: Tuesday, October 14, 1:30-3:00pm ET B-Term: Tuesday, October 28, 11:00am-12:30pm ET 201: Learn about LGBTQIAP+ history, queer identity in other cultures, and queer liberation. Participants are encouraged to either attend the 101 training or have solid foundational knowledge before attending the 201 training. A-Term: Wednesday, September 17, 2:00-3:30pm ET B-Term: Wednesday, November 5, 1:30-3:00pm ET

On Wednesday, November 5, from 3:30–4:30 PM in the i3 Lab, join us for a panel discussion featuring rotational and leadership development program coordinators who manage top programs across many industries. Learn how these programs accelerate professional growth, build leadership skills, and open doors to diverse career pathways in today’s competitive business world.

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Go Behind the Scenes at Polar Beverages!On Thursday, November 6, join us for an exclusive site visit to Polar Beverages, Worcester’s iconic company with a rich history of branding, innovation, and community impact.The bus departs at 10 AM and returns by 12 PM, giving participants a unique opportunity to see firsthand how Polar has built its reputation as a leader in the beverage industry. Learn about the company’s operations, explore its production process, and gain insights into how tradition and innovation come together to shape a lasting brand.This site visit is a highlight of Business Week, don’t miss the chance to experience a Worcester business legacy up close!Registration for this event is limited and preference will be given to students attending as part of a course assignment or experience. Click this link to register today!

Semidefinite Relaxations for Robot Perception and Control: From Theory to Practice and Back Abstract:Many problems in robot perception, control, and planning can be formulated as nonconvex polynomial optimization problems (POPs). The Moment–SOS (sums-of-squares) hierarchy provides a principled approach by relaxing a nonconvex POP into a sequence of convex semidefinite programs (SDPs) whose optimal values converge to that of the original problem. Despite its theoretical elegance, the framework is often viewed as impractical due to the need to solve large-scale and ill-conditioned SDPs.In the first part of this talk, I will show how problem-specific structure in robotics can be exploited to make Moment–SOS relaxations practical at scale. On the perception side, I will present XM, our structure-from-motion pipeline that leverages monocular depth prediction to cast bundle adjustment as a polynomial optimization problem. Using GPU-accelerated low-rank Riemannian optimization, XM solves bundle adjustment instances with thousands to tens of thousands of images. On the control side, I will introduce SPOT, a trajectory planning pipeline that exploits sparsity inherent in robot motion planning problems, such as Markov and kinematic chain structure. With a GPU-accelerated ADMM solver, SPOT is able to generate near–globally optimal trajectories within seconds, including contact-rich motions.In the second part, I will turn to theory, briefly highlighting our recent work on understanding and accelerating the convergence of first-order methods for SDPs. This includes proving local linear convergence of ADMM, designing a composite polynomial filter for approximate projection onto the positive semidefinite cone, and analyzing the slow-convergence regions of ADMM.Bio:Heng Yang is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2022 and his B.S. from Tsinghua University in 2015. He leads the Harvard Computational Robotics Group, which is broadly interested in the intersection of theory and practice, with a focus on computational algorithms that are robust, efficient, and equipped with strong performance guarantees. His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Best Systems Paper Award at RSS 2025, a 2025 Best Paper Award Finalist from the IEEE Technical Committee on Model-based Optimization for Robotics, a Best Paper Award Finalist at RSS 2021, the Best Paper Award in Robot Vision at ICRA 2020, a Best Paper Award Honorable Mention from IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters in 2020, and recognition as an RSS 2021 Pioneer.

What drives us every day: MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER HOME.It's our purpose, our common goal.A strong commitment that resonates with the day-to-day work of our teams.Values, employee well-being, social and environmental initiatives, intrapreneurship...Here's a glimpse of what you could experience with us.Join the Saint-Gobain team as they immerse themselves into WPI Campus Life. All are welcome!SCHEDULE - November 6, 202511:00AM to 1:00PM - Career Pathways Spotlight SeriesMark Rayfield, CEO of Saint-Gobain North hosted by President Grace Wang Location: Innovation Studio 203 Lunch Provided at 12:00PM12:00PM to 1:00PMLunch & NetworkingLocation: Innovation Studio 205 & Diamond Lounge (2nd Floor)1:00PM to 2:30PMNetworking and Product Demos with the Saint-Gobain TeamLocation: Quad & Innovation Studio (2nd Floor) Questions? Contact WPI Office of Corporate Partnershipsocp@wpi.edu

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

The first event in the Gordon Library's 25-26 WPI Author Series, "For a Change," features Professor Mahamadou Lamine Sagna, faculty in the WPI Social Science and Policy Studies (SSPS) department, and Inaugural Director of Africana Studies.Prof. Sagna will discuss his book Cornel West Matters: Politics, Violence, Racism, and Religion in America (2024, WPI Press) with WPI Press Editor in Chief and Head, SSPS, Prof. Rob Krueger. Updated to reflect Cornel West’s independent candidacy in the 2024 US presidential campaign, this second edition explores West’s role as a philosopher, activist, and prominent intellectual with a singular dialectical and sometimes contradictory voice, echoing the title of West’s most influential books, Race Matters (1993) and Democracy Matters (2004). A zoom link will also be made available here. Please check back!Please note that the Gordon Library’s elevator remains out of service; visitors who wish to avoid using the stairs are welcome to join via zoom.

Global Asia Hub and HUA Music are hosting Prof. Ian Condry, MIT Cultural Anthropologist and MIT Spatial Sound Lab organizer. He explores global flows of media and culture, focusing on Japanese Hip-Hop, anime, and spatial audio for live performance.

Alumni & Student SocialJoin us on Thursday, November 6, from 5–7 PM in Odeum A/B for the Alumni & Student Social. This event brings together WPI alumni, students, and faculty for an evening of networking, conversation, and community building.Celebrate Business Week by strengthening connections, sharing experiences, and creating opportunities for future collaborations. Whether you’re a student eager to learn from alumni or an alum looking to give back and reconnect, this social is the perfect way to conclude the week.Don’t miss this chance to engage with the WPI Business School community!You can register by clicking this link.

Title:Algorithm–Hardware Co-Design for LiDAR Point Cloud Processing: Classic and Learning-Based Approaches Abstract:LiDAR perception is a cornerstone of modern autonomous systems, enabling reliable 3D scene understanding for self-driving, robotics, and intelligent infrastructure. As sensors shift from mechanical to solid-state designs and produce denser, higher-rate point clouds, computational demands escalate. Meeting real-time, low-power, and small-form-factor requirements on edge platforms remains challenging for conventional CPU/GPU pipelines.This dissertation presents a hardware-friendly LiDAR perception framework through algorithm–hardware co-design on FPGAs and introduces three key designs: (1) a stream-based ground-segmentation method with a parallel optimization path for solid-state LiDAR, enabling fully pipelined, low-latency processing; (2) a Fast Channel-Clustering (FCC) algorithm for real-time instance formation using line-buffered, local-search micro-architectures; and (3) a ReAct Binary PointPillar detector that binarizes network weights and replaces multiplications with XNOR–popcount, substantially reducing computational and memory requirement while preserving accuracy. All designs emphasize deep pipelining, resource efficiency, and deterministic execution to meet tight timing and energy budgets on edge platforms.In addition to standalone modules, this work integrates classical geometric methods with learning-based approaches to form a hybrid pipeline. It proposes a panoptic-segmentation flow that couples semantic segmentation with clustering-based instance formation, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy.The proposed designs are evaluated on KITTI/SemanticKITTI dataset and real-world collected LiDAR data, demonstrating strong accuracy, high throughput, and robust generalization across multiple types of LiDAR — pointing toward practical, deployable LiDAR intelligence at the edge. Research Advisor:Prof. Xinming HuangECE Department, WPI Committee Members:Prof. Shahin TajikECE Department, WPIProf. Tian Guo Computer Science Department, WPIProf. Honggang WangGraduate Department Chair, Computer Science & Engineering, Yeshiva University

Join ODIME on Fridays from 12:00-2:00pm ET in OASIS House for milk and freshly baked cookies! For more information or accommodations, please contact ODIME at diversity@wpi.edu. All are welcome!

Gain insight from some of The Business School's most recent interns!Join us on Friday, November 7, from 3 PM–4 PM online for the "Preparing for your Internship Virtual Panel." Students who are currently or recently on internship will share about their experiences.Hear about their internship, their first date, lessons learned and what they would have done differently.You can register for the Zoom at this link.

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