The overall purpose of this seminar is to bring together people with interests in Computer Vision theory and techniques and to examine current research issues. This course will be appropriate for people who already took a Computer Vision graduate course or already had research experience in Computer Vision. To enroll in this course, you must either: (1) be in the PhD program or (2) receive permission from the instructors.

Each seminar will consist of multiple short talks (around 10 minutes) by multiple people. Students can register for 1 credit for CSE 656. Registered students must attend and present a minimum of 2 or 3 talks. Everyone else is welcome to attend. Fill in https://forms.gle/pCVXovgfMfQwGqG38 to subscribe to our mailing list for further announcement.
Abstract: The rapid growth of observational data presents unprecedented opportunities to enhance both the predictability and mechanistic understanding of Earth systems. However, fully harnessing big Earth data needs computational frameworks that bridge the gap between physics-based models and machine learning. In this talk, I will first demonstrate how AI methods can significantly improve the prediction of environmental systems. Despite their predictive accuracy, machine learning models often lack physical interpretability, limiting their ability for scientific inquiry. To address this, I will introduce the developed hybrid, differentiable modeling framework that unifies physical models with machine learning in an end-to-end trainable system. This framework autonomously learns from large observations while maintaining physical clarity. The machine learning components can be seamlessly embedded into physical backbones to assimilate multi-source data, support automatic parameterization, and represent uncertain processes. I will showcase applications of this framework in simulating and understanding the terrestrial water cycle and its interactions with ecosystems at continental and global scales. This talk will highlight how differentiable modeling not only improves the modeling ability in both data-rich and data-scarce scenarios, but also provides a systematic pathway to enhancing model structures, deciphering uncertain physical relations, and facilitating knowledge discovery in Earth system sciences.


IACS Seminar Speaker: Dapeng Feng, Stanford Univeristy

Location: IACS Seminar Room

George Em Karniadakis received his SM and PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was appointed lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 1987 and subsequently he joined the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford/Nasa Ames. He joined Princeton University as assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and as associate faculty in the program of applied and computational mathematics. He was a visiting professor at Caltech in 1993 in the Aeronautics Department and joined Brown University as associate professor of applied mathematics in the Center for Fluid Mechanics in 1994. After becoming a full professor in 1996, he continues to be a visiting professor and senior lecturer of Ocean/Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is an AAAS fellow (2018), fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2010), fellow of the American Physical Society (2004), fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2003) and associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2006). He received the Alexander von Humboldt award in 2017, the Ralf E Kleinman award (2015), the J. Tinsley Oden Medal (2013), and the CFD award (2007) from the US Association in Computational Mechanics. His h-index is 103, and he has been cited over 52,000 times.


Abstract:
Karniadakis will present a new approach to develop a data-driven, learning-based framework for predicting outcomes of physical and biological systems, governed by PDEs, and for discovering hidden physics from noisy data. He will introduce a deep learning approach based on neural networks (NNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs). He will also introduce new NNs that learn functionals and nonlinear operators from functions and corresponding responses for system identification. Unlike other approaches that rely on big data, here we learn from small data by exploiting the information provided by the physical conservation laws, which are used to obtain informative priors or regularize the neural networks. He will demonstrate the power of PINNs for several inverse problems in fluid mechanics, solid mechanics and biomedicine including wake flows, shock tube problems, material characterization, brain aneurysms, etc., where traditional methods fail due to lack of boundary and initial conditions or material properties. He will also present a new NN, DeepM&Mnet, which uses DeepOnets as building blocks for multiphysics problems, and he will demonstrate its unique capability in a 7-field hypersonics application.  

To register and for more information, click here.  
Time: May 5, 2022, Thursday, 02:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Place: New Computer Science (NCS) Room 220, and Zoom

Zoom link: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/95948672934?pwd=d3ZDcUJkK3VweFBDVWhIVDhtaFU2Zz09
Meeting ID:  959 4867 2934
Passcode:  082036

Title:  Generative Adversarial Learning using Optimal Transport

Abstract: 

Generative Adversarial Learning (GAL) aims to learn a target distribution in an adversarial manner. A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a concrete implementation of GAL using a discriminator and a generator that play a min-max game. GANs have been used in many machine learning and computer vision applications. However, GANs are known to be hard to train, mainly because a min-max saddle point optimization problem needs to be solved in GAL. In this thesis, I investigate several methods to improve generative adversarial learning using Optimal Transport (OT). 

Previous Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) do not compute the correct Wasserstein distance to train the discriminator. To address this problem, I propose WGAN-TS that uses the L1 transport cost and computes the correct Wasserstein distance to train the discriminator. To ensure the local convergence of WGANs, I propose WGAN-QC that adopts the quadratic transport cost. I prove that WGAN-QC not only computes the correct Wasserstein distance but also converges to a local equilibrium point. To compute the Wasserstein distance over the whole dataset, I propose to use Semi-Discrete Optimal Transport (SDOT) to match noise points and the real images during GAN training. To measure the quality of an SDOT map, I use the Maximum Relative Error (MRE) and the L_1 distance between the target distribution and the transported distribution obtained by an OT map. I propose statistical methods to estimate the MRE and the L_1 distance. I propose an efficient Epoch Gradient Descent algorithm for SDOT (SDOT-EGD). To deal with the 2D special case of GAL, I propose to use OT to learn 2D distributions. In particular, I adopt OT to match persistent diagrams in training a topology-aware GAN and learn density maps in the crowd counting task. Finally, I use OT and the topological maps of the crowd to improve the crowd counting performance and propose a topology-based metric to measure the quality of the crowd density maps.
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Register here: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/meeting/register/RD94cHiHRwCj6xNkCZqNEg
As generative AI tools become increasingly prevalent in education, their impact on collegiate writing raises important questions about creativity, academic integrity, and effective teaching practices. This panel brings together faculty and students to share perspectives on the opportunities and challenges that AI presents in an academic setting. Through an open dialogue, participants will engage in meaningful conversations, allowing for a deeper understanding of each other's viewpoints and fostering collaboration. Students and faculty will explore diverse ways AI can be used in teaching and learning and seek solutions to utilize AI writing tools ethically. This exchange aims to build a community of trust and shared knowledge, ensuring that AI's role in education is both innovative and responsible.

Register here: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAqdOitpjIpHtDGAsGBfEb3ah0YIzhIJolN
Abstract: Drawing on group-theoretic and information-theoretic foundations, we propose information lattice learning (ILL) as a general framework to learn rules of a signal (e.g., an image or a probability distribution). In our definition, a rule is a coarsened signal used to help us gain one interpretable insight about the original signal. To make full sense of what might govern the signal's intrinsic structure, we seek multiple disentangled rules arranged in a hierarchy, called a lattice. Compared to representation/rule-learning models optimized for a specific task (e.g., classification), ILL focuses on explainability: it is designed to mimic human experiential learning and discover rules akin to those humans can distill and comprehend. We will detail the mathematical foundations and algorithms of ILL, and illustrate how it addresses the fundamental question what makes X an X by creating rule-based explanations designed to help humans understand. Our focus is on explaining X rather than (re)generating it. We show ILL's efficacy and interpretability on benchmarks and assessments, as well as a demonstration of ILL-enhanced classifiers achieving human-level digit recognition using only one or a few MNIST training examples (1-10 per class). We present applications in knowledge discovery, using ILL to distill music theory from scores and chemical laws from molecules and further revealing connections between them. We close with some early work on understanding the principles that govern scattering amplitudes in Super Yang-Mills theory, rather than just predicting them.

Biography: Lav R. Varshney is the Della Pietra Infinity Professor and inaugural director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. He is co-founder and CEO of Kocree, Inc., a startup company building novel human-controllable AI for discovery and creativity, and chief scientist of Ensaras, Inc., a startup company focused on AI and wastewater treatment. He holds appointments at RAND Corporation and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was previously on the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a visiting scholar at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a principal research scientist at Salesforce Research AI, and a research staff member at IBM Research. He is a former White House staffer, having served on the National Security Council staff as a White House Fellow, where he contributed to national AI and wireless communications policy. His research interests include information theory and artificial intelligence. He received his B.S. degree from Cornell University and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Location: Room 102