(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:     Prof. Aviv Tamar

                        Electrical and Computer Engineering department, Technion

Monday, May 12^th, 2025

13:00 - 14:00

Sense-Plan-Act in the age of Deep Learning

Abstract

A central paradigm in autonomous robots is the "sense-plan-act" loop, where at each time step the robot observes the environment, plans an appropriate action, executes it, and continues to the next observation. This talk focuses on the role of deep neural networks in this paradigm. I will first cover several works on learning world models for robotic manipulation, starting with the Causal InfoGAN model for rope manipulation, and more recent work based on our Deep Latent Particles (DLP) model. Here, neural networks are used to learn a model of the environment, which can be used for planning, or for directly learning a policy. The second part of the talk will focus on using neural networks to speed up a planning algorithm (e.g., tree search), based on our recent work on Bayesian Online Planning. The main idea is that neural networks can be seen as approximate posteriors in a Bayesian formulation of tree search that we propose. In this formulation, the *uncertainty* of the neural network prediction is automatically accounted for, and can be exploited for faster search.

Short Bio

Aviv Tamar is an associate professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Technion. His work focuses on reinforcement learning and robot learning. Aviv is the recipient of the Krill prize, an ERC starting grant, and best paper awards at NeurIPS and NSDI.

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Fundamental understanding of physiological processes that occur at biological membranes, such as membrane fusion, necessitates addressing not only the biochemical aspects, but also biophysical aspects such as membrane mechanical properties and membrane curvature. In this talk, I will show how we combine membrane model systems, micropipette aspiration, optical tweezers and confocal fluorescence microscopy to study membrane shaping and membrane fusion processes. I will describe a new tool we developed, where we form membrane bilayers supported on polystyrene microspheres which can be trapped and manipulated using optical tweezers. Using this approach, we demonstrate successful measurements of the interaction forces between the Spike protein of SARS CoV-2 and its human receptor, ACE2. We further use bead-supported membranes interacted with aspirated vesicles to reveal the inhibitory effect of membrane tension on hemifusion. I will also describe a particular case of membrane shaping during the formation of the newly discovered organelle termed migrasome. We show that tetraspanin proteins involved in migrasome formation strongly partition into curved membrane tethers, and we reveal a novel, two-step process of migrasome biogenesis.

About the speaker

Dr. Sorkin obtained her BSc in Chemical Engineering at the Technion and MSc in Materials Science and Engineering at TAU. She completed her PhD in the group of Prof. Jacob Klein at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she studied mechanical and tribological properties of liposomes in the context of biological lubrication. She then pursued a postdoc at the group of Prof. Gijs Wuite at VU Amsterdam. Since July 2020, Raya is a faculty member at the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her lab studies membrane shaping and remodeling events using single-molecule mechanical methods. She has received several prestigious awards and grants, including the EBSA young investigator award and medal, the Krill Prize, and the ERC starting grant, among others.

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