The Provost's Lecture Series features talks by SUNY Distinguished Academy faculty members at Stony Brook University, showcasing the outstanding research and scholarship that is taking place at our institution.

Joe Mitchell

SUNY Distinguished Professor, Applied Mathematics and Statistics
Chair, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences

A Case for Algorithms: A Computational Geometer's Perspective

Algorithms are all around us in every smart device and technology that has consumed our daily lives. As a computational geometer, I study algorithms to solve problems that involve a geometric perspective on data. I have observed that practically every technology and field of study has a need for effective algorithms involving geometric data. I reflect on some favorite algorithmic problems that are easy to visualize, but challenging to solve, and argue that the formal study of algorithms remains essential in the age of AI.

Reception to follow immediately after the talks.

Register here.

International Love Data Week is a global event dedicated to celebrating data in all its forms. This year, Stony Brook University is excited to celebrate Love Data Week with a series of 30-minute webinars aimed to promote proficiency with data, showcase innovative data projects, and foster a community of data enthusiasts across campus. Hosted by the Division of Educational & Institutional Effectiveness and facilitated by the Office of Educational Effectiveness, we invite all SBU faculty, staff and students to join in the festivities, learn from colleagues in our campus community, and fall in love with the power of data!

Learn more here.


This session brings together the scientists, agencies, and community partners generating environmental data across New York City to confront a shared challenge: critical atmospheric and marine data is being collected across the region, but too often in silos that limit its reach and impact.

​The program uses Governors Island's own environmental sensing efforts as a working case study, then opens into a broader conversation about how disparate data streams across NYC can be coordinated, shared, and activated--pointing toward the kind of cross-sector collaboration The Exchange's campus is designed to enable.

Register here.

As part of a grant project funded by the AI3 Institute, a group of instructors participated in a faculty development program, Fostering Writing-to-Learn Skills with Critical AI Literacy: A Faculty Development and Student Support Program. This program was developed to support instructors across campus with navigating/integrating AI in their courses specifically around writing intensive/involved assignments. We would like to invite anyone interested to the culmination of this program, a mini-symposium, where the participants will share practical changes they made or are making around writing intensive/involved assignments and AI.

Location: Wang 201

A light lunch will be served. Please register by Friday, November 7th.


Reception to follow.

Abstract:
In this talk, I will present our journey of developing diverse, adaptive, uncertainty-calibrated AI planning agents that can robustly communicate and collaborate for multi-agent reasoning (on math, commonsense, coding, etc.) as well as for interpretable, controllable multimodal generation (across text, images, videos, audio, layouts, etc.). In the first part, we will discuss improving reasoning via multi-agent discussion among diverse LLMs and structured distillation of these discussion graphs (ReConcile, MAGDi), adaptively learning to balance abstraction, decomposition, refinement, and fast+slow thinking in LLM-agent reasoning (ReGAL, ADaPT, MAgICoRe, System-1.x), as well as confidence calibration in LLMs via speaker-listener pragmatic reasoning and making LLMs better teammates via multi-agent positive-negative persuasion balancing (LACIE, PBT). In the second part, we will discuss interpretable and control-lable multimodal generation via LLM-agents based planning and programming, such as layout-controllable image generation (and evaluation) via visual programming (VPGen+VPEval), consistent multi-scene video generation via LLM-guided planning (VideoDirectorGPT), interactive and composable any-to-any multimodal generation (CoDi, CoDi-2), as well as feedback-driven multi-agent interaction for adaptive environment/data generation via weakness discovery (EnvGen, DataEnvGym).
Bio:
Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-NLP Group) in the Computer Science department at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013 and his BTech from IIT Kanpur in 2008. His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal generative models, grounded and embodied semantics, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning.
Optimization and Machine Learning - presented by Yifan Sun

Abstract: Optimization is a growing topic of interest in the machine learning community. It starts out as an option to check in Tensorflow (SGD? Adam? Adagrad?), but as we get more into the how and why of these options, we uncover many fundamental principles relating to operations research, control theory, and dynamical systems, dating back as far as the Cold World era. 

In this talk I will give a broad overview of some of the important optimization themes in machine learning. I will try to give connections between tools we are used to seeing in popular packages 
and fundamental optimization concepts like duality, convexity, contractive operators, etc. While we cannot hope to completely cover this diverse research area, I hope to provide a glimpse of this exciting research area that is permeating more and more into the machine learning world. 

Bio: Yifan Sun received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Los Angeles in 2015, with research focusing on convex optimization and semidefinite programming. She was then Technicolor Research and Innovation, focusing on machine learning and 
data science applications. More recently, she completed two postdocs focusing on optimization, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and INRIA, in Paris, France.

Abstract: The development of embodied AI has largely focused on scaling data and computational power, often at the cost of energy efficiency. In contrast, biological intelligence achieves remarkable adaptability with minimal resources, inspiring a shift toward neuromorphic AI, an approach that mimics the structure and dynamics of biological neural systems. In this talk, I will explore the promises and challenges of neuromorphic computer vision from three key perspectives: algorithms, robot actions, and data. First, I will discuss algorithmic advances, including continuous visual hull reconstruction, continuous-time human motion field estimation, and unsupervised independent motion segmentation. Next, I will illustrate how neuromorphic vision enables agile robotic actions by leveraging event-based perception for real-time decision-making. Finally, I will address challenges in training data-driven models with event data, highlighting strategies to enhance data availability and efficiency. By integrating these elements, neuromorphic AI paves the way for energy-efficient, high-performance embodied intelligence in dynamic real-world environments.

Speaker Bio: Ziyun (Claude) Wang is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Professor Kostas Daniilidis. His research focuses on developing algorithms for neuromorphic computer vision and integrating them with real hardware to enable agile perception in embodied AI systems. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked at the Samsung AI Center New York, where he developed 3D reconstruction techniques for robotic applications and earned three patents. He also contributed to the Apple Vision Pro team, enhancing user comfort for AR glasses. His research work has been recognized at major computer vision, robotics, and machine learning venues including the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) workshops, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL), with an oral presentation at ECCV placing in the top 2.7%. His research aims to drive the development of next-generation bio-inspired AI systems, enabling more efficient, adaptive, and intelligent embodied perception.
CSE 656 Seminars in Computer Vision - Wednesdays 11:30am-12:50pm, Room NCS 120

The overall purpose of this seminar is to bring together people with interests in Computer Vision theory and techniques and to examine current research issues. This course will be appropriate for people who already took a Computer Vision graduate course or already had research experience in Computer Vision. To enroll in this course, you must either: (1) be in the PhD program or (2) receive permission from the instructors.

Each seminar will consist of multiple short talks (around 10 minutes) by multiple people. Students can register for 1 credit for CSE656. Registered students must attend and present a minimum of 2 or 3 talks. Everyone else is welcome to attend. Fill in https://forms.gle/pCVXovgfMfQwGqG38 to subscribe to our mailing list for further announcement.

The first meeting will be Wed Jan 29 at 11.30am, room 120 New CS. The meeting will deal with organizational matters and we will start right away with some presentations. Send David Paredes Merino <dparedesmeri@cs.stonybrook.edu> an email if you are interested but cannot attend the first meeting. Please forward to people outside the CS department that you think might be interested.
What comes after today's large language models and deep neural networks? Join the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) for a virtual 30-min community chat led by David Jensen, CCC Council Member and lead author of the new CCC whitepaper, Envisioning Possible Futures for AI Research. Jensen will explore paradigm-shifting AI Research Futures like Neuro-Symbolic, Embodied, Multi-Agent, and Quantum AI, and then open the floor to the audience for an engaging Q&A discussion.

Register here.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment process can be easily circumvented, whether intentionally or accidentally. Does alignment fine-tuning yield have robust effects on models, or are its impacts merely superficial? In this work, we make the first exploration of this phenomenon from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Empirically, we demonstrate the elasticity of post-alignment models, i.e., the tendency to revert to the behavior distribution formed during the pre-training phase upon further fine-tuning. Leveraging compression theory, we formally deduce that fine-tuning disproportionately undermines alignment relative to pre-training, potentially by orders of magnitude. We validate the presence of elasticity through experiments on models of varying types and scales. Specifically, we find that model performance declines rapidly before reverting to the pre-training distribution, after which the rate of decline drops significantly. Furthermore, we further reveal that elasticity positively correlates with the increased model size and the expansion of pre-training data. Our findings underscore the need to address the inherent elasticity of LLMs to mitigate their resistance to alignment.

Speaker: Huajian Zhang

Location: CS2311