{ "149939-21907416": { "datetime_modified":"20260922T172115", "datetime_start":"20260924T103000", "datetime_end":"20260924T123000", "has_end_time":1, "date_start":"2026-09-24", "date_end":"2026-09-24", "time_start":"10:30:00", "time_end":"12:30:00", "time_zone":"America\/Detroit", "event_title":"2026 National Postdoc Appreciation Week", "occurrence_title":"Postdoc Info Fair", "combined_title":"2026 National Postdoc Appreciation Week: Postdoc Info Fair", "event_subtitle":"", "event_type":"Workshop \/ Seminar", "event_type_id":"21", "description":"National Postdoc Appreciation Week (NPAW) 2026 is an annual event sponsored by the\u00a0National Postdoctoral Association. The week honors the research, innovation, and vital contributions of postdoctoral fellows. This year\u2019s theme is celebrating 150 years of the U.S. postdoc position.\u00a0", "occurrence_notes":null, "guid":"149939-21907416@events.umich.edu", "permalink":"http:\/\/events.umich.edu\/event\/149939", "building_id":"", "building_name":"", "campus_maps_id":"", "room":"", "location_name":"Kalamazoo Room, 2nd floor", "has_livestream":0, "cost":"", "tags":["Sessions"], "website":"https:\/\/sessions.studentlife.umich.edu\/p\/track\/17567", "sponsors":[ { "group_name":"Sessions @ Michigan", "group_id":"4791", "website":"https:\/\/sessions.studentlife.umich.edu\/" } ], "image_url":"", "styled_images":{ "event_thumb":"", "event_large":"", "event_large_2x":"", "event_large_lightbox":"", "group_thumb":"", "group_thumb_square":"", "group_large":"", "group_large_lightbox":"", "event_large_crop":"", "event_list":"", "event_list_2x":"", "event_grid":"", "event_grid_2x":"", "event_feature_large":"", "event_feature_thumb":"" }, "occurrence_count":6, "first_occurrence":21907415 } , "152617-21914185": { "datetime_modified":"20260922T083438", "datetime_start":"20260924T103000", "datetime_end":"20260924T123000", "has_end_time":1, "date_start":"2026-09-24", "date_end":"2026-09-24", "time_start":"10:30:00", "time_end":"12:30:00", "time_zone":"America\/Detroit", "event_title":"Long-horizon and Multimodal Reasoning for Contact-rich Manipulation", "occurrence_title":"", "combined_title":"Long-horizon and Multimodal Reasoning for Contact-rich Manipulation: PhD Defense, Zixuan Huang", "event_subtitle":"PhD Defense, Zixuan Huang", "event_type":"Presentation", "event_type_id":"16", "description":"Committee chair: Dmitry Berenson\n\nAbstract: \nContact-rich manipulation is central to many everyday robotic tasks, from assembly and tool use to cable routing and threading. Unlike free-space motion, these tasks require robots to deliberately make and maintain contact with objects and the environment, where small errors can cause large changes in forces, motion, and task outcome. Successful manipulation therefore requires reasoning about both how contact interactions evolve over time and how those interactions can be inferred from incomplete sensory observations.\nThis dissertation addresses two complementary challenges in contact-rich manipulation: long-horizon reasoning and multimodal reasoning. Long-horizon tasks such as cable routing require planning over extended sequences of contact interactions, where locally reasonable actions may lead to globally incorrect outcomes. Meanwhile, precise assembly and threading are often only partially observable from vision, motivating the integration of force and tactile sensing.\n\nThe first thrust develops diffusion-based subgoal generation methods that provide long-horizon guidance to model predictive control, including contact-aware representations that capture object\u2013environment relationships. The second thrust develops multimodal generative models that jointly reason about actions, vision, force, touch, and proprioception, and investigates how control-relevant representations can be learned within world-action models. 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