Abstract:
Quantifying similarity is a central notion in science and data analysis, pervading everything from phylogenetic trees to the foundation of clustering. Unfortunately, despite being examined and applied for decades, traditional similarity and distance metrics have fundamental drawbacks. The key problem is that all of them are only defined over pairs of objects, so they scale quadratically when one tries to compare N objects. The present explosion in the amount of data available to us requires new ways to process information, and while some current algorithms can handle millions of points, we need alternatives applicable to billions. This is what motivated us to develop a new framework that can compare any number of objects at the same time. With this, we achieve an unprecedented linear scaling when comparing multiple objects. Here we will discuss the main properties of this formalism, along with its applications in drug design and to the analysis of Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. Our indices have proven to be incredibly versatile when applied to chemical space exploration and visualization, allowing us to rigorously quantify the chemical diversity of very large molecular libraries. This has led to the creation of several algorithms to sample important regions in chemical space, including a more efficient way of identifying the prevalence of activity cliffs. Additionally, our indices provide a convenient route to sample complex MD trajectories, allowing to identify representative structures very efficiently. Moreover, we can also cluster biological ensembles in a more robust way than with standard algorithms, which has led to our group's work on MDANCE, a very flexible and efficient open-source clustering module. Drop by if you want to know how we clustered one billion molecules!


Speaker:
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Quantum Theory Project
University of Florida, Gainesville
Website: https://quintana.chem.ufl.edu/

Location:
Laufer Center Lecture Hall 101
Title: Building foundation models for scientific data Seminar

Speaker: Ruben Ohana, Ph.D. and Michael McCabe, Ph.D - Flatiron Institute, New York

Abstract: Foundation models are very large architectures trained on large-scale datasets and can be used to transfer knowledge from a domain to another. Scientific data, particularly numerical simulations of partial differential equations (PDEs), presents unique challenges due to its complexity and the need for domain expertise to assess prediction quality, complicating the building of the first foundation models in this field. In this talk, we will develop our approach of building foundation models for scientific data, highlighting the requirements and expectations for achieving meaningful results. We will also introduce The Well, a comprehensive collection of datasets encompassing multi-scale simulations of fluid dynamics, astrophysics, and biological systems. The Well serves as a foundation for developing models that generalize across diverse physical phenomena, aiming to accelerate scientific discovery through large-scale learning.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1606898802?pwd=GbbPiLGHlEokDskxjeFheMFWfuboxO.1
Meeting ID: 160 689 8802
Passcode: 281575
The Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference is a premier international academic conference in the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP). Organized annually by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) special interest group on linguistic data (SIGDAT), it focuses on research that uses empirical methods to solve language processing problems.

For more information, and registration, visit the official website.
Title:Deep Contextual Modeling for Natural Language Understanding, Generation, and Grounding Zoom instructions: Join Zoom Meeting https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/645050299?pwd=TVJVRkc3dlhxdDF5d00xWGlDQkovZz09 Meeting ID: 645 050 299 Password: 810247 One tap mobile +16468769923,,645050299#,,#,810247# US (New York) +13126266799,,645050299#,,#,810247# US (Chicago) Dial by your location +1 646 876 9923 US (New York) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 301 715 8592 US +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 408 638 0968 US (San Jose) +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) +1 253 215 8782 US Meeting ID: 645 050 299 Password: 810247 Find your local number: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/u/aemTiJMXu6 Abstract: Natural language is a fundamental form of information and communication. In both human-human and human-computer communication, people reason about the context of text and world state to understand language and produce language response. In this talk, I present several deep neural network based systems that first understand the meaning of language grounded in various contexts where the language is used, and then generate effective language responses in different forms for information access and human-computer communication. First, I will introduce Speaker Interaction RNNs for addressee and response selection in multi-party conversations based on explicit representations for different discourse participants. Then, I will present a text summarization approach for generating email subject lines by optimizing quality scores in a reinforcement learning framework. Finally, I will show an editing-based multi-turn SQL query generation system towards intelligent natural language interfaces to databases. Bio:Rui Zhang is a final year Ph.D. student at Yale University advised by Professor Dragomir Radev. His research interest lies in various natural language processing problems in understanding, generation, and grounding. He has been working on (1) End-to-End Neural Modeling for Entities, Sentences, Documents, and Multi-party Multi-turn Dialogues, (2) Text Summarization for Emails, News, and Scientific Articles, (3) Cross-lingual Information Retrieval for Low-Resource Languages, (4) Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing in Human-Computer Interaction. Rui Zhang has published papers and served as Program Committee members at top-tier NLP and AI conferences including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, AAAI, CoNLL. During his Ph.D., He has done research internships at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Grammarly Research, and Google AI. He was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and got his bachelor's degrees at both the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University from the UM-SJTU Joint Institute.

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 26, 2024, 12:00 pm -- CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room

Speakers

Hanfei Yan, NSLS-II

David Park, CDS, AI Dept

Xihaier Luo, CDS, AI Dept

Join Zoom Meeting

https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1601052863?pwd=eIX9qZKPGNtQ11uwbK8JP5hIdIxA3V.1

Meeting ID: 160 105 2863

Passcode: 442980


CSE 600 Talk: Haibin Ling - Computer Vision Research and Applications


Abstract: Having been intensively studied over half a decade, computer vision has evolved as a broad research area and become mature in many applications. In this talk, we will summarize our work in computer vision in both core vision topics and application-oriented ones. In particular, for core vision problems, we will report studies on visual tracking, visual matching and visual detection; for applications, we will describe our work on medical image analysis, intelligent transportation, smart projector systems and preliminary work on material property prediction.

Bio: Haibin Ling received the BS and MS degrees from Peking University in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and the PhD degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2006. From 2000 to 2001, he was an assistant researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. From 2006 to 2007, he worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2007, he joined Siemens Corporate Research as a research scientist. From 2008 to 2019, he worked as a faculty member of Temple University. In fall 2019, he joined the Department of Computer Science of Stony Brook University where he is currently a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor. His research interests include computer vision, augmented reality, medical image analysis, and human computer interaction. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM UIST in 2003, and the NSF CAREER Award in 2014. He serves as Associate Editor for several journals including IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), Pattern Recognition (PR), and Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU). He has served or will serve as Area Chair for CVPR 2014, 2016, 2019 and 2020.
Abstract: AI agents are increasingly deployed in complex, interactive environments, yet their runtime remains a major bottleneck for training, evaluation, and real-world use. Typical agent behavior unfolds sequentially, where each action requires an API call that can incur substantial latency. For example, a game of chess between two state-of-the-art agents can take hours. We introduce speculative actions, a lossless acceleration framework for general agentic systems. Inspired by speculative execution in microprocessors and speculative decoding in LLM inference, our method uses faster models to predict likely future actions and executes them in parallel, committing only when predictions match. We evaluate speculative actions across gaming, e-commerce, and web search environments, and additionally study a lossy extension in an operating systems setting. Across domains, we achieve up to 55% next-action prediction accuracy, translating into substantial latency reductions. Finally, we present a cost-latency analysis that formalizes the tradeoff between speculative breadth and time savings. This analysis enables principled tuning and selective branch launching, to ensure multi-branch speculation delivers practical speedups without prohibitive cost growth.

Speaker: Kehan Qi

Location: Old Computer Science Building - CS2311
18th Annual Engineering Ball Flowerfield, St. James, NY Thursday April, 2nd, 7:00 to 10:00 pm Pick up your tickets in 231 Engineering (Monday - Friday, 10:00 am to 4 pm) Presenting Partner: L3Harris