The Provost's Spotlight Talks feature eminent visitors to the university as well as Stony Brook faculty members who have recently been recognized for outstanding contributions in their field.

Transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins, Kusama endowed chair in art in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, brings her expertise in AI to the next Spotlight Talk with The Stories We Encode: AI, Love and the Future of Algorithmic Care on Tuesday, October 22, at 3:30 pm in the Charles B. Wang Center Theatre.

Working at the intersection of emerging technologies and social collaboration, Dinkins was named a 2023 TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI. She was recognized for her work with Not the Only One, an ongoing project in which she trained an AI on three generations of Black women to give it cultural roots, a deep history, and a perspective that existing systems do not offer.

The event is free and open to the public, and the discussion will be followed by a reception in the Wang Theatre lobby, hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences for new and promoted faculty.


About the Talk

AI's impact on society necessitates addressing longstanding human rights issues and prejudices. To ensure AI benefits humanity, we must confront institutional biases, rethink our relationship with other beings and emerging technologies, and reconcile ideals with actual power structures. This involves recognizing systemic inequalities, redefining human identity, and equitably distributing resources. AI, if developed and used ethically, offers an opportunity to reimagine a more equitable world for all inhabitants.

Academic Integrity and CELT invite faculty to an open discussion on managing the challenges of classroom technology and AI, handling misconduct suspicions and reports, and accessing resources like syllabus templates and recommended policy language. Our goal is to promote transparency about policies and procedures and empower faculty with easily accessible resources and strategies.

Register here to join.

Abstract: Olfaction plays an essential role in everyday life. Anosmia, the loss of the sense of smell, affects approximately 20% of adults globally and its prevalence rises with age. This can lead to malnutrition, reduced ability to detect environmental hazards, and high rates of depression. The olfactory epithelium (OE) is a specialized tissue deep within the nasal cavity that primarily contains olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs), which are crucial cells that detect odorants and relay information to the olfactory neural pathway. Current clinical assessments for anosmia cannot discern whether the cause lies within the OSNs (sensorineural) or further down the pathway (central). The ability to image the OE would help assess the health of OSNs, distinguish between sensorineural and central causes of anosmia, and inform treatments. However, the OE is a small region of tissue that is non-uniform and difficult to distinguish from its surrounding respiratory epithelia (RE). This work explores the use of an FDA-approved dye, Indocyanine Green (ICG), to highlight tissue structure differences and help distinguish between OE and RE. We found that machine learning models using texture analysis information were able to classify images of the two tissue types correctly with ~80% accuracy, while a convolutional neural network was able to classify the images directly with ~90% accuracy. This advancement will enable accurate identification and mapping of the spatial distribution of OSNs within the nasal cavity, enhancing studies on olfactory degeneration and regeneration.


Bio: Skylar Suarez has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Florida. She spent nearly a decade as a software and hardware engineer, then decided to follow my dream of being involved in medicine and becoming a professor. She is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where she also teaches courses in biological data analysis and machine learning. She specializes in neural engineering, particularly in the development and design of neurosurgical tools for assessing neurodegenerative disorders.


Location: New Computer Science, Room 220 OR Join by Zoom

You are cordially invited to attend the biweekly Brookhaven AI Mixer (BAM). BAM includes three short talks on AI research happening at BNL, followed by an open mixer over coffee and snacks for everyone to network and discuss all things AI. The first half hour will consist of presentations that will be available via ZOOM, and the second half hour will be for in person only networking.

Join us every other Tuesday at noon in CDSD's Training Room (building 725, 2nd floor) to learn about interesting AI methods and applications, engage with potential collaborators, prepare for pending FASST funding calls, and build a community of AI for Science at BNL.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 12:00 pm -- CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room

Speakers

Carlos Soto, CDS

Yi Huang, CDS

Kevin Yager, CFN

IACS and the Dept of Ecology and Evolution invite you to a PRODiG+ Fellowship Seminar.

Computational Approaches to Understanding and Forecasting Biodiversity Responses to Global Change

Summary: Advancing biodiversity forecasting requires developing computational approaches that better represent ecological complexity. In this talk, I will discuss how my research integrates field observations, predictive modeling, machine learning, and spatiotemporally explicit environmental data to develop more mechanistic and reliable forecasting tools.

Speaker: Dr. Anna Thonis, a postdoctoral researcher in NYU's Winchell Lab and Founder and Co-Chair of the IUCN SSC Anoline Lizard Specialist Group, studies how anthropogenic change reshapes the distributions of reptiles. Combining field and quantitative modeling methods, her work focuses on the ecology and conservation of Puerto Rican and urban Anolis lizards. Her website can be accessed here.

Location: IACS Seminar Room, and via Zoom.

Zoom: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/97023584426?pwd=HrnrYeYJfVUhaS8iOKjWF3Tbh8HYS1.1&jst=2
ID: 97023584426
Passcode: 241762
Abstract: Generative image models trained on massive datasets encode the statistics of our visual world. An off-the-shelf diffusion or flow-matching model can therefore serve as a general-purpose image prior, providing information about images across a wide range of tasks. Harnessing these capabilities, however, requires combining the model at inference time with additional signals or constraints unknown during training. This thesis will develop training-free methods for inference under a generative denoising prior. I first show how sampling from a trained denoiser can be formulated as an optimization problem, which combined with a constraint, can solve tasks ranging from conditional generation and weakly supervised segmentation to combinatorial optimization. I then demonstrate how the inherent properties of denoisers can accelerate inference under such constraints. Replacing gradient descent with an inexact Newton update, based on the symmetry of the denoiser's Jacobian, substantially reduces inference costs without tradeoffs. I also explore a middle ground between model adaptation and fully training-free inference by using the denoiser's robust internal representations to learn constraints from limited labeled data. These methods are applied to gigapixel image domains such as digital histopathology and remote sensing, where generative models can only be trained at a patch scale. To synthesize arbitrarily large images at resolutions unseen during training, I introduce inference-time algorithms that enforce consistency across spatially overlapping patches and image scales. Finally, I propose repurposing inference-time algorithms from sampling tools, to mechanisms for understanding the prior learned by a denoising model. Extending the previously developed techniques, I analyze the Jacobians of generative denoisers, where preliminary results indicate that Jacobian spectra correlates with generative quality. This motivates a Jacobian-spectrum regularization as a way to improve model performance using insights derived from inference-time algorithms.

Speaker: Alexandros Graikos

Location: NCS 220
Predictable Autonomy for Cyber-Physical Systems by Stanley Bak, Safe Sky Analytics

ABSTRACT: Cyber-physical systems combine complex physics with complex software. Although these systems offer significant potential in fields such as smart grid design, autonomous robotics and medical systems, verification of CPS designs remains challenging. Model-based design permits simulations to be used to explore potential system behaviors, but individual simulations do not provide full coverage of what the system can do. In particular, simulations cannot guarantee the absence of unsafe behaviors, which is unsettling as many CPS are safety-critical systems.

The goal of set-based analysis methods is to explore a system's behaviors using sets of states, rather than individual states. The usual downside of this approach is that set-based analysis methods are limited in scalability, working only for very small models. This talk describes our recent process on improving the scalability of set-based reachability computation for LTI hybrid automaton models, some of which can apply to very large systems (up to one billion continuous state variables!). Lastly, we'll discuss the significant overlap of techniques used for our scalable reachability analysis methods with set-based input/output analysis of neural networks.

BIO: Stanley Bak is a computer scientist investigating the predictable design of autonomous cyber-physical systems. He strives to develop practical formal methods that are both scalable and useful, which demands developing new theory, programming efficient tools and building experimental systems. He received a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2007 (summa cum laude), and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2009. He completed his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at UIUC in 2013. He received the Founders Award of Excellence for his undergraduate research at RPI in 2004, the Debra and Ira Cohen Graduate Fellowship from UIUC twice, in 2008 and 2009, and was awarded the Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship from 2009 to 2013. From 2013 to 2018, Stanley was a Research Computer Scientist at the US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), both in the Information Directorate in Rome, NY, and in the Aerospace Systems Directorate in Dayton, OH. He currently helps run Safe Sky Analytics, a research consulting company investigating verification and autonomous systems, and performs teaching as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.