Synthetic Dreams and Ghost Machines

Dr. Steven Skiena will join the Cinema for a presentation exploring the rapidly evolving worlds of artificial intelligence and robotics.

Dr. Skiena is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. A leading researcher in data science and algorithms, he is the author of several influential books on AI and computation, including The Algorithm Design Manual and The Data Science Design Manual.

The presentation will be followed by a screening of Ex Machina, Alex Garland's provocative science-fiction thriller exploring the seductive and unsettling boundaries between human consciousness and artificial intelligence.

The infrastructure decisions being made around AI today will shape competitive advantage, cost, control, and institutional trust for years to come.

Organizations will invest in AI either way. The strategic question is whether they remain dependent on systems they cannot fully inspect or influence, or help shape shared infrastructure that they can adapt, govern, and build upon.

We would like to invite you to a live executive briefing from the AI Alliance. The discussion will focus on what leaders should understand now:

  • The state of the movement: how 205 organizations across 29 countries are collaborating on more than 30 open projects.
  • Project Tapestry: our global initiative to build frontier-capable, open-sourced AI through shared development, while allowing participating institutions to retain control over their data, resources, and strategic priorities.
  • The business and policy landscape: how cost, sovereignty, trust, and access are reshaping AI strategy.
  • Paths to participation: how organizations can contribute through the AI Alliance Open R&D Community and the Open Source AI Innovation Association.

Register here.

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, December 10, 2024, 12:00 pm -- CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room

Speakers

Esther Tsai, CFN
Yugang Zhang, CFN
Sanket Jantre, CDS

Join Zoom Meeting

https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1611764217?pwd=asNaXHDwGLnMr9hDv3L6zAcsQaN5FX.1

Meeting ID: 161 176 4217
Passcode: 855752



New York Scientific Data Summit (NYSDS) is a premier annual conference that brings together researchers and thought leaders from academia, national labs and industry to exchange ideas and foster collaboration focused on data-driven science and technology. Co-hosted by Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University, NYSDS 2025 will take place on September 11-12, 2025, in the SUNY Global Center in New York City.

NYSDS 2025 will spotlight artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and robotics - fields currently at a pivotal point with transformative impacts on science and technology. From accelerating computationally demanding simulations to discerning signals from noisy data, AI/ML has become an integral part of the scientific workflows. Despite many advances, challenges remain to ensure that AI/ML applications are reliable, explainable and trustworthy.

Robotics, a growing field that couples AI with physically actuated mechanical bodies, has seen increased interest in areas spanning science, technology and manufacturing. The need for real-time decision-making and control, along with the intricate morphology of robots, makes robotics an intriguing application of AI, advanced computing and optimization.


This NYSDS 2025 is open to the public. To be eligible to attend, all participants must register online by August 30, 2025. For questions or assistance with registering, please contact the Summit Coordinator.

Register here.

The Division of Educational & Institutional Effectiveness is excited to host International Love Data Week at SBU, February 9-13, 2026!
Join us for a mix of 30-minute virtual sessions, an in-person kickoff on Monday, and a student-focused event on Wednesday celebrating data and data-informed decision-making.
Wrap up the week at the Love Data Week Open House on Friday, 2/13 with light refreshments, data-themed swag, photos with Wolfie, and time to connect with presenters.
Learn more and register on https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/oee/recognition/Love%20Data%20Week%202026%20Save%20the%20Date%20Placeholder.php
What Does Learning Mean? presented by Jeffrey Heinz

ABSTRACT
When we develop learning algorithms, what computational problems are we solving? In this talk, I discuss different answers that have been proposed for this question, and discuss some of the consequences for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The main lessons I offer are that (1) feasible solutions to learning problems require careful consideration of a target class C of functions, (2) that such a class C cannot include all functions, or even all computable functions, and so many logically possible functions must be outside of C and (3) class C must have significant structure which the solutions take advantage of. These main ideas are motivated and illustrated from modeling language acquisition and the related problem of grammatical inference from example sequences belonging to formal languages.

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, January 7, 2025, 12:00 pm -- CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room

Speakers

Maria Zawadowicz, EBNN--ML for Atmospheric Aerosol Research

Mohammad Atif, CDS--An Extensible Digital Twin Framework

Guang Zhao, CDS--Pareto Prompt Optimization

Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1615289117?pwd=Hqkbj9itxWrFnkhZ8rQXHPInO2gxdF.1

Meeting ID: 161 528 9117
Passcode: 991382


Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized how people interact with knowledge, offering unprecedented opportunities to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. In this talk, I will discuss my research on the synergy between LLMs and scientific knowledge--specifically how these models extract, induce, and verify knowledge to automate the research lifecycle. First, I will cover our work on improving knowledge extraction from vast scientific literature, focusing on enabling models to comprehend long documents in a cost-efficient and comprehensive manner. I will describe a novel paradigm for representing document-level structured information as question-answer pairs and how we address the challenges of long-context understanding by leveraging global context through retrieval-augmented modeling. Next, I present our pioneering work on using LLMs for new scientific hypothesis generation. We introduce a framework employing reinforcement learning with fine-grained reward modeling and adaptive controllers.
This approach balances novelty, feasibility, and effectiveness to generate inspiring and actionable research hypotheses. Finally, I will discuss work on the first LLM Scientist for machine learning research. I will demonstrate how LLMs can move beyond hypothesis generation to participate in the execution and validation of scientific hypotheses, ensuring that the discovered knowledge is not only innovative but also grounded and verified.

Bio: Xinya Du is a tenure-track assistant professor at UT Dallas Computer Science Department. He earned a Ph.D. degree from Cornell University and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois (UIUC). He has also worked at Microsoft Research, Google Research, and Allen Institute AI. His research is on large language models, deep learning, and their applications in science.His work has been published in leading NLP and ML conferences (ACL, ICLR, NeurIPS). His research has received multiple recognitions, including a Best Paper Award at AAAI AI for Research and a Best Poster Award at ICML AI for Science workshop. His work was included in the list of Most Influential ACL Papers and has been covered by major media like New Scientist. He was named a Spotlight Rising Star in Data Science by the University of Chicago and is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Amazon Research Award, Cisco Research Award, Open Philanthropy Award, and the NSF CAREER Award.

Location: NCS 120