By studying and evaluating the argumentation that LLMs provide, we can determine factors that may benefit or hinder the model's ability to give a complete, cohesive, and thorough answer. While there are signs that LLMs pattern match, finding where, when, and why this fails is valuable, as there may be ways to help the model imitate solutions that are more relevant to the task it is attempting to solve. Determining when pattern matching is not enough could show an area of improvement for future generations of LLMs. This research may separately aid in work on human-(AI)agent and inter-agent interaction. Specifically, frameworks could be used to determine when and why other models or humans are convinced by LLM-generated responses and which argument methods cause other models to change their response. Our current research in systematic versus heuristic cues shows that large language models sometimes present systematic or heuristic reasoning patterns based on prompting. Future research aims to explore other methods of classifying argumentation.
Speaker: Kiera Gross
Joining link: https://meet.google.com/xae-ywpv-udo
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
Jianda Chen, EBNN - Improving the stability and accuracy of PDE-ML hybrid AGCMs
Boyang Li, CDS - Accelerating Materials Discovery using Machine Learning
Jaehye on Do, NPP Isotopes - Using LLMs for Isotopes Research and Production
Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1615289117?pwd=Hqkbj9itxWrFnkhZ8rQXHPInO2gxdF.1
Meeting ID: 161 528 9117
Passcode: 991382
Google Docs has been updated to integration Gemini AI. Learn about the integrations that gives you more features within Google Docs. There are also AI Automations that will keep you updated when things happen with documents.
In this session, you will:
- Learn about the AI features within Google Docs
- Learn about workflow to be notified of changes to Docs
- Understand the features that allow AI to work
Register here.
You are cordially invited to attend the biweekly Brookhaven AI Mixer (BAM). BAM includes one short talk 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.
Abstract: This presentation will begin by outlining key challenges facing the modern power grid and summarizing our group's research efforts to address them. It will then discuss how AI and machine learning are reshaping the grid modernization. The major focus of the talk will highlight a range of AI/ML applications we have developed in recent years to enhance grid operation, planning, control, and security.
Biography: Meng Yue is currently leading the Grid Modernization and Security Group in the Interdisciplinary Science Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). He received his Ph. D. from Michigan State University in electrical engineering. His major research interests include power system modeling, simulation, and control, and applications of AI/ML- and quantum machine learning and quantum computing in operation, planning, and security of the future grid.
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.
Location: CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room
Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1604383624?pwd=ffQ5cUPNxTI7nzClKQO6cnsNbhF9Vf.1
Meeting ID: 160 438 3624
Passcode: 558449
You are cordially invited to attend the biweekly Brookhaven AI Mixer (BAM). BAM includes one short talk 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.
Abstract: Two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene, hBN, and TMDs offer atomically sharp interfaces and unprecedented tunability when vertically assembled into van der Waals heterostructures. These stacks have enabled discoveries ranging from moiré superconductivity and correlated insulators to quantum emitters and next-generation nanoelectronic devices. Yet constructing high-quality heterostructures remains largely artisanal: researchers manually identify exfoliated flakes, align a polymer stamp by eye, and finely adjust temperature and contact geometry through tacit skill. This manual workflow is difficult to reproduce, scales poorly, and prevents systematic exploration of the enormous combinatorial space of materials, twist angles, and interfacial conditions. AutoLab is an autonomous platform that translates this tacit human expertise into programmable, feedback-driven control. Instead of pressing flakes with predefined trajectories, AutoLab uses machine vision to detect polymer-wafer contact, dynamically regulates contact evolution through closed-loop actuation and temperature control, and captures high-quality flakes with the cleanliness and precision of expert manual fabrication. The system integrates perception, decision making, and motion planning into a single robotic framework, enabling reproducible stacking, wafer-level coverage, and accelerated discovery. Beyond 2D materials, AutoLab illustrates a broader paradigm for AI-native scientific automation: codifying human experimental reasoning into algorithms that interrogate data in real time, adaptively adjust instrumentation, and generate scalable, high-fidelity datasets. Such platforms could generalize to diverse research domains--quantum device fabrication, optical alignment, surface science, autonomous microscopy, and other workflows where expert intuition currently limits throughput and reproducibility. By bridging artisanal manipulation and robotic autonomy, AutoLab points toward a future where scientific discovery is accelerated by machines that not only execute instructions, but learn, respond, and collaborate with human scientists.
Biography: Dr. Yutao Li is a research associate from Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Material Science, Brookhaven National Laboratory. He has 8 years of experience in 2D material sample fabrication, and investigation in their electronic transport, optical and mechanical properties.
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.
Location: CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room
Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1604383624?pwd=ffQ5cUPNxTI7nzClKQO6cnsNbhF9Vf.1
Meeting ID: 160 438 3624
Passcode: 558449
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.
Bio: Jieshu Wang is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Arizona State University (ASU), focusing on the social dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI). With a background in engineering, economics, communication, and science and technology studies, she examines how AI both shapes and is shaped by broader societal forces. Her research employs interdisciplinary methods to explore the social, political, and economic factors influencing AI development, as well as its role in innovation, the economy, the future of work, climate change mitigation, and popular culture. Jieshu holds a Ph.D. in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology from ASU. She is also a science book translator and has translated six books.
Location: Old Computer Science, room 1310
ChatGPT for Developing Interactional Competence: Affordances and Constraints
MIC Distinguished Lecture Series
Abstract: The advent of ChatGPT has redrawn the boundary of pedagogical discourse, where the dyadic configuration of teacher-student has, for many, become triadic -- one that includes AI as an relevant third party, not to be missed or dismissed. Within applied linguistics, AI-focused research has predominantly targeted the teaching and learning of writing (Fang & Han, 2025). The work on AI and speaking, on the other hand, has largely involved perception studies documenting its positive impact on learners' willingness to communicate (Goh & Aryadoust, 2025). In this talk, I explore the role of AI in the teaching and learning of speaking, and in particular, the development of interactional competence. Based on a corpus of learner-AI interactions, I demonstrate the ways in which ChatGPT excels and fails at acting as a useful conversation partner, with a view towards furthering our ongoing deliberation on the affordances and constraints of AI in language education.
Speaker: Hansun Zhang Waring is Professor of Linguistics and Education at Columbia University and founder The Language and Social Interaction Working Group (LANSI). As an applied linguist and a conversation analyst, Hansun is interested in all things interaction -- (second language) pedagogical interaction, communication with the public, parent-child interaction, and human-AI interaction (HAI). Her work has appeared in leading journals in applied linguistics and discourse analysis as well as numerous book volumes, some of which she (co-)authored or co-edited. She is on the editorial boards of Chinese Language and Discourse (CLD), Classroom Discourse (CD), and International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL).
Location: HUM 1006
You are cordially invited to attend the biweekly Brookhaven AI Mixer (BAM). BAM includes one short talk on AI research happening at BNL, followed by an open mixer. 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.
We meet every other Tuesday at noon in CDSD's Training Room (building 725, room 2-124) 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.
Abstract: Identifying model Hamiltonians is a vital step toward creating predictive models of materials. We combined Bayesian optimization with the EDRIXS numerical package to infer Hamiltonian parameters from resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) spectra within the single atom approximation. To evaluate the efficacy of our method, we tested it on experimental RIXS spectra for several materials and demonstrated that it can reproduce results obtained from hand-fitted parameters to a precision similar to expert human analysis while providing a more systematic mapping of parameter space. Our work provides a key first step toward solving the inverse scattering problem to extract effective multi- orbital models from information-dense RIXS measurements, which can be applied to a host of quantum materials.
Biography: Marton Lajer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory. Marton obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at the Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary, in 2021. He was a junior research fellow at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Budapest before joining BNL in September 2022. His background spans various analytical and performance-critical numerical methods, mostly in the context of low- dimensional quantum field theories and quantum many-body systems. His research currently focuses on incorporating AI-enhanced methods to various problems in inelastic spectroscopy.
In addition to our speaker, we will have a number of CDS staff in attendance with expertise in AI methods and applications including image analysis, foundation models development, and inverse problem solving.
Location: CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room
Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1604383624?pwd=ffQ5cUPNxTI7nzClKQO6cnsNbhF9Vf.1
Meeting ID: 160 438 3624
Passcode: 558449
Please Note: Due to a funding shortfall, we are for the time being no longer able to provide pizza and sodas for these events. We will have coffee though, and all are of course welcome to bring their lunch.