AI on Campus: Your Thoughts, Your Future

Join the Conversation: Share Your Thoughts about Learning, Academics, and AI

The world of college is changing fast, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the center of it. We are part of the Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum with AAC&U, and we need to hear from the people AI affects most: you!

This is an open discussion for all students to share their honest experiences, their top concerns, and their best ideas about AI in our academic environment. We'll be diving into these key questions:

  • How can AI actually make learning better or easier? What opportunities do you see for using AI tools to enhance your assignments, research, or skills?

  • What are your biggest worries about AI? Is it about cheating, being graded fairly, or preparing for the job market? How is AI impacting your workload or stress levels?

  • What specific tools, workshops, or policies would help you use AI responsibly and successfully? (Think training, software, or clear rules.)

Dates/Times:

  • Wednesday, 2/4 at 2pm

  • Thursday, 2/5 at 12pm

Please register in advance for the Zoom link.

Can't Make It? Share Your Feedback!

Don't worry if you can't attend! You can still share your thoughts via video in our AI Zoom Room or via email: rose.tirotta-esposito@stonybrook.edu.

Videos will not be shared publicly and comments will only be shared in aggregate.

Your voice matters. Come tell us how AI is affecting your studies, your stress, and your success!

  • Dr. Rose Tirotta-Esposito (Assistant Provost; Director of CELT)

  • Dr. Elizabeth Hewitt (Associate Professor in the Department of Technology and Society (DTS) in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

  • Chris Kretz (Associate Librarian and Head of Academic Engagement at SBU Libraries)

  • Prof. Rajiv Lajmi (Assistant Professor in the School of Health Professions and Chair of Applied Health Informatics)

  • Dr. Matthew Salzano (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication in the School of Communication and Journalism)

Join us at the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) for an interactive Zoom workshop on Generative AI designed for faculty and staff interested in enhancing teaching and assessment practices, increasing student engagement, and navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of AI tools. Participants will be introduced to common AI tools, explore potential instructional uses, and discuss key considerations such as academic integrity, transparency, and equity.

Register now: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/meeting/register/6js1eP64T1ys8tyU57EJ7Q#/registration

We will demonstrate how to make a personalized AI partner that can do certain tasks for you. This step by step process can be used to develop your own companion.

Understand what is a Gemini Gems and how it can be personalized for your custom needs. We will show you how to capture the tasks that you would like to complete and give you higher quality responses that will ensure your communication and tasks are completed with ease.

Register here.

Abstract: Self-supervised representation learning (SRL) has emerged as a pivotal advancement in machine learning, offering high-quality data representations without the need for labeled datasets. While SRL has demonstrated enhanced adversarial robustness compared to supervised learning, its resilience against other attack types, particularly backdoor attacks, remains an open question. Recent studies have revealed potential vulnerabilities in SRL, underscoring the necessity for a comprehensive security analysis. However, existing research often extrapolates attacks from supervised learning paradigms, neglecting the unique challenges and opportunities inherent to self-supervised mechanisms.

This thesis proposal aims to address three critical objectives in the realm of self-supervised learning: (1) exploring novel attack vectors, (2) implementing and evaluating practical attacks, and (3) developing robust countermeasures. We focus on two key SRL paradigms: Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Models. For Contrastive Learning, we synthesize existing security vulnerabilities and introduce innovative attack vectors, such as CTRL, to uncover distinctive risks. We conduct a comparative analysis of contrastive and supervised learning approaches in their defense against these threats, exploring potential safeguards and highlighting the limitations of current protective measures in self-supervised contexts. Regarding Diffusion Models, we demonstrate inherent vulnerabilities in their application to adversarial purification.

Our research aims to illuminate the unique challenges posed by emerging attack vectors in self-supervised learning, fostering technical advancements to address underlying security risks in real-world applications. By contributing to the development of more resilient and secure self-supervised representation learning systems, we seek to enhance their reliability and trustworthiness in practical scenarios. This comprehensive examination of SRL's security landscape will provide valuable insights for the broader machine-learning community and pave the way for more robust AI systems.

Join here.
The Renaissance School Of Medicine Department of Scientific Affairs and its Single Cell Genomics facility are excited to host a special seminar and discussion on AI and single cell genomics analysis:

With the decreasing cost of sequencing, many biobanks and large research cohorts have moved to whole genome sequencing (WGS) and single-cell RNA-seq. However, making use of this deluge of data remains a challenge. I will discuss statistical and deep learning approaches that we are exploring to address the challenge of noncoding variant interpretation, including our work as part of the Alzheimer's disease sequencing project.

Speaker: David A. Knowles, PhD. Asst. Professor of Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Appointee in Systems Biology, Columbia University Core Faculty Member, New York Genome Center

Join us in person: Health Science Tower Level 3, Lecture Hall 5


The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence called representation learning, but generally referred to as deep learning.



ICLR is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of deep learning used in the fields of artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, gaming, and robotics.

ICLR is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Participants at ICLR span a wide range of backgrounds, from academic and industrial researchers, to entrepreneurs and engineers, to graduate students and postdocs.

The rapidly developing field of deep learning is concerned with questions surrounding how we can best learn meaningful and useful representations of data. ICLR takes a broad view of the field and includes topics such as feature learning, metric learning, compositional modeling, structured prediction, reinforcement learning, and issues regarding large-scale learning and non-convex optimization.

A non-exhaustive list of relevant topics explored at the conference include:



  • Unsupervised, Semi-supervised, and Supervised Representation Learning
  • Representation Learning for Planning and Reinforcement Learning
  • Metric Learning and Kernel Learning
  • Sparse Coding and Dimensionality Expansion
  • Hierarchical Models

  • Optimization for Representation Learning
  • Learning Representations of Outputs or States
  • Implementation Issues, Parallelization, Software Platforms, Hardware
  • Applications in Vision, Audio, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Robotics, Neuroscience, or Any Other Field


For more information or registration, please visit the official website.

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.

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.

AI for Neutrino Oscillation Fits

Abstract: Neutrino oscillation experiments face the problem of performing likelihood fits in a very highdimensional space to extract the oscillation parameters from measured spectra. The current strategy for this is to fix all but a few parameters, reducing the dimensionality of the fit to a manageable number, but this risks missing correlations between the parameters, which can impact the systematics of the measurement. This is an area where artificial intelligence and machine learning could make great improvements. I will discuss the problem, explain how it is currently dealt with, and sketch one possible way of implementing AI to solve it, using a sampling method combining Smolyak's algorithm, for efficient sampling using sparse grids, with an adaptive grid refinement to increase sampling in regions that are more likely to contain the global minimum.

Speaker: Steven Linden is a physicist in the Instrumentation Department at BNL working on neutrino and dark matter experiments. He got his PhD from Yale in 2010 doing analysis on the MiniBooNE experiment and then worked on various dark matter detectors (MiniCLEAN, Pico, SENSEI) at SNOLAB in Canada for nearly ten years before moving to BNL.

Location: CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room

Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1614473319?pwd=e4QSSgFHqDzHx870ixJpwuG3yqBere.1

Meeting ID: 161 447 3319
Passcode: 733283

AI is everywhere and so are the privacy concerns that come with it. At its core, the most common forms of AI we use today are online digital services and thus inherit the usual privacy risks. We'll take a look at indirect prompt injection- a technique that can trick AI tools into revealing or extracting private information as well as techniques being used in academic contexts to manipulate systems and even mislead researchers.

Register here for the online session.