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Mechanical properties of disordered networks can be significantly tailored by modifying a small fraction of their bonds. This procedure has been used to design and build mechanical metamaterials with a variety of responses. A long-range…

The elasticity of disordered and polydisperse polymer networks is a fundamental problem of soft matter physics that is still open. Here, we self-assemble polymer networks via simulations of a mixture of bivalent and tri- or tetravalent…

Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While traditional entropic network models can be fit to the total stress, their underlying assumptions are inconsistent with simulation results.…

The mechanics of complex soft matter often cannot be understood in the classical physical frame of flexible polymers or rigid rods. The underlying constituents are semiflexible polymers, whose finite bending stiffness ($\kappa$) leads to…

Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…

Deep neural networks have been the predominant paradigm in machine learning for solving cognitive tasks. Such models, however, are restricted by a high computational overhead, limiting their applicability and hindering advancements in the…

Each element in tensioned structural networks -- such as tensegrity, architectural fabrics, or medical braces/meshes -- requires a specific tension level to achieve and maintain the desired shape, stability, and compliance. These structures…

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often over-parameterized for their tasks and can be compressed quite drastically by removing weights, a process called pruning. We investigate the impact of different pruning techniques on the classification…

Neural network pruning has shown to be an effective technique for reducing the network size, trading desirable properties like generalization and robustness to adversarial attacks for higher sparsity. Recent work has claimed that…

Deep neural networks are strongly over-parameterized, often containing far more weights than required for their task. Although such redundancy can aid optimization, it leads to inefficient deployment and high computational cost, motivating…

Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…

Inspired by the ubiquity of composite filamentous networks in nature we investigate models of biopolymer networks that consist of interconnected floppy and stiff filaments. Numerical simulations carried out in three dimensions allow us to…

The toughness of a polymer material can increase significantly if two networks are combined into one material. This toughening effect is a consequence of a transition from a brittle to a ductile failure response. Although this transition…

We study the elasticity of fibrous materials composed of generalized stiff polymers. It is shown that in contrast to cellular foam-like structures affine strain fields are generically unstable. Instead, a subtle interplay between the…

Hydrogels of semiflexible biopolymers such as collagen have been shown to contract axially under shear strain, in contrast to the axial dilation observed for most elastic materials. Recent work has shown that this behavior can be understood…

Model pruning seeks to induce sparsity in a deep neural network's various connection matrices, thereby reducing the number of nonzero-valued parameters in the model. Recent reports (Han et al., 2015; Narang et al., 2017) prune deep networks…

We investigate the interplay between pre-stress and mechanical properties in random elastic networks. To do this in a controlled fashion, we introduce an algorithm for creating random freestanding frames that support exactly one state of…

Disordered spring networks are a useful paradigm to examine macroscopic mechanical properties of amorphous materials. Here, we study the elastic behavior of under-constrained spring networks, i.e.\ networks with more degrees of freedom than…

Neural networks have seen an explosion of usage and research in the past decade, particularly within the domains of computer vision and natural language processing. However, only recently have advancements in neural networks yielded…

Pruning is one of the most effective model reduction techniques. Deep networks require massive computation and such models need to be compressed to bring them on edge devices. Most existing pruning techniques are focused on vision-based…