Over the past decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made stunning advances, from mastering language to solving the structure of proteins. These breakthroughs arise from more than forty years of work in neural networks, where ideas from neuroscience have inspired solutions in AI. In this lecture, Anthony Zador, MD, PhD, will explore how reverse engineering the brain's computations has driven progress in both fields, and how this back-and-forth between neuroscience and AI is set to grow even stronger -- with brain-inspired designs driving new AI advances while AI tools transform our understanding of how the brain works.

Speaker:
Dr. Zador works at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. He is the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he served as Chair of Neuroscience. He was named one of Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers and is a recipient of the Brain Research Foundation Fellowship, the Gill Symposium Transformative Investigator Award, and the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award.

Watch online at stonybrook.edu/live

The AI Innovation Institute cordially invites you to the Summer Symposium this Friday, July 31st, from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM in the Stony Brook Union Ballroom.



Poster Presentations: 10:00 - 11:30 am - Union Ballroom
Closing remarks: (11:25) Dr. Carl Lejuez, Executive Vice President & Provost
Group Photos (11:30-12)

Featuring undergraduate researchers/participants of the following:

• AI Innovation & Diffusion Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)
  
• Explorations in STEM
• Frances Velay Fellowship Program
• Oncology Research and Clinical Learning Experience (ORACLE)
  
• SUNY EOP
  
• SUNY SOAR
  
• URECA REACT/Research Entry Accelerator for College Transfers
• URECA Summer

Join us in celebrating the hard work and accomplishments of our students.

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.)

Date: Monday, December 1st
Time: 12:30pm-1:45pm
Location: West Campus - Location TBD
or
Date: Wednesday, December 3rd
Time: 10:30am-11:45am
Location: East Campus - HSC 2-154B

Please register in advance so we can confirm the room.

Note: 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)

Abstract: Humans perceive the world through global structures such as parts, branches, and their spatial arrangement. Most deep learning models, however, operate mainly at the pixel level. This disconnect between local and global understanding limits interpretability and control. In this thesis, we explore topology as a mathematical framework for bridging local predictions and global structure in dense prediction and generation tasks. We first incorporate topological constraints into semantic segmentation to preserve anatomical relationships and improve multi-class consistency. We next develop structure-level uncertainty estimation, producing more interpretable and actionable measures of model error over branches and connections rather than isolated pixels. Then, we introduce a topology-guided diffusion framework for controllable image generation using structural attributes such as object count and connectivity. Finally, we extend image generation to the longitudinal task, where we aim to capture structural changes across timepoints. All these contributions together establish topology as a unifying interface for building dense prediction models that are structurally aware, interpretable, and controllable.

Speaker: Saumya Gupta

Location: NCS 220

Zoom: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/97950688136?pwd=NCa3XOsgIaMIsTVlQBQJ11n27NzL8s.1
Meeting ID: 979 5068 8136
Passcode: 941798

Join Stony Brook University's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) for a bootcamp on how to use AI to enhance your teaching and courses. This event will demonstrate how ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and other generative AI platforms can support you in crafting learning objectives, writing exam questions, composing rubrics, and designing course content such as lesson plans, in-class activities, instructional videos, and more.

Register here.

Objectives:
1. Explain the clinical radiology workflow, and highlight how AI is currently in use to impact each step
2. Describe how radiologists interact with the currently available tools, highlighting both positive andnegative examples
3. Offer a brief description of how these tools are approved, validated, and reimbursed
4. Explore the utility of cutting edge AI techniques in diagnostic radiology

Speaker:
Dr. David Payne, MD Neuroradiologist and Assistant Professor, Rush University Medical Centre

Remote Access:
Zoom: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/95617197636?pwd=KytzZ2pVRG9SZGpKZUtpNXJISjNjZz09
Meeting ID: 95617197636
Passcode: 924293

Abstract: Recent advances in Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) pair histology images with spatially resolved gene expression profiles, enabling predictions of gene expression across different tissue locations based on image patches. This opens up new possibilities for enhancing whole slide image (WSI) prediction tasks with localized gene expression. However, existing methods do not fully leverage the interactions between different tissue locations, which are crucial for accurate joint prediction. To address this, we introduce MERGE (Multi-faceted hiErarchical gRaph for Gene Expressions), which combines a multi-faceted hierarchical graph construction strategy with graph neural networks (GNN) to improve gene expression predictions from WSIs. By clustering tissue image patches based on both spatial and morphological features, and incorporating intra- and inter-cluster edges, our approach fosters interactions between distant tissue locations during GNN learning. As an additional contribution, we evaluate different data smoothing techniques that are necessary to mitigate artifacts in ST data, often caused by technical imperfections. We advocate for adopting gene-aware smoothing methods that are more biologically justified. Experimental results on gene expression prediction show that our GNN method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on multiple metrics such as mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and pearson correlation coefficient (PCC). Qualitative analysis establishes the effectiveness of MERGE in capturing cancer marker genes, thus consolidating its utility in diagnostics. As an extension of this work, we use MERGE in a setting with an uncertainty calibration branch to perform robust gene expression smoothing. We show that using patch-wise uncertainty from an uncertainty calibration model and the gene expression predictions from MERGE to enrich the ground truth gene expression matrix, results in better alignment with pathologist annotations, thus establishing that the smoothing is biologically informed.

Speaker: Aniruddha Ganguly

Location: Virtual Zoom Meeting


https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/5474847973?pwd=Sng0Q2h1c1d3cm9sbFBmYUczMHZNdz09
Meeting ID: 547 484 7973
Passcode: 206739

Abstract: Recent progress in large language and vision models demonstrates how far we can go by scaling with vast internet-scale data. In contrast, physical AI, agents that perceive and act in the real world, still lags far behind. Today, both academia and industry primarily pursue generalizable physical AI by scaling up: collecting large-scale action-video datasets or training world models that enable interaction through learned environments. However, this paradigm is inherently inefficient and will soon reach a data ceiling. In this talk, I argue for a shift from scaling up to scaling out. I introduce reality world simulators, a new paradigm that converts real-world videos into diverse, interactive simulation environments. Instead of relying on more data collection, this approach expands data through structured reconstruction and recomposition, enabling both higher data efficiency and physically grounded interaction. I will present a three-pronged approach: 1) Scaling out via Digital Twins: reconstructing controllable, interactive environments from monocular videos to support diverse agent exploration. 2) Scaling out via Digital Cousins: disentangling scene structure into compositional elements to generate large-scale variations of real-world environments. 3) Scaling out via Embodied Humans: incorporating realistic human dynamics to improve safety and social compliance in robot learning. Finally, I will outline a roadmap toward building generalizable and safe physical AI systems for open-world deployment.

Bio: Dr. Wayne Wu is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA Computer Science, working closely with Bolei Zhou, and collaborating with Trevor Darrell (UC Berkeley EECS) and Jiaqi Ma (UCLA CEE). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University in June 2022 and was previously a visiting Ph.D. student at Nanyang Technological University. He also spent seven years in industry, where he led the research and development of products that reached more than 10 million end users worldwide. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. He focuses on developing infrastructure and methods to scale physical AI, enabling robots to work reliably and safely in the open world. He has published over 50 papers at top-tier venues including CVPR, ICCV, ICLR, NeurIPS, and ICRA, with over 9,500 citations and 10,000 GitHub stars. His work has received a CVPR Best Paper Candidate and multiple Oral, Spotlight, and Highlight presentations. He was also honored with the 2025 UCLA Chancellor's Award for Postdoctoral Research, recognizing the best postdocs at UCLA, and he was the only awardee from the School of Engineering. He serves as an Area Chair at CVPR 2026.

Location: NCS 120

Abstract:
People shift their visual attention to gather and prioritize information from their surroundings, helping them navigate complex environments. Understanding these attentional shifts involves decoding the features that guide where attention is directed (spatial areas of focus) and when attention shifts (timing). Decoding these processes can aid applications from interface design to medical diagnosis. However, prior models have not fully explored the underlying factors addressing these aspects. In this dissertation, we study the factors that guide visual attention across diverse image types, spanning natural images, graphic design documents, and whole slide images (WSIs) of cancer tissues, while also predicting visual attention based on these factors.
First, we propose a method to quantify object recognition uncertainty as a factor influencing spatio-temporal attention (where and when) in natural images. We found that it plays a larger role than bottom-up saliency in guiding visual attention. Second, we analyze graphic design documents such as webpages, comics, posters, mobile UIs, etc., which differ from natural images in that they are designed to convey specific messages or elicit desired viewer response. We propose a unified and interpretable deep learning model that predicts both static and dynamic visual attention behavior (addressing where and when) by integrating document layout and content saliency as factors, enhancing attention prediction performance. Finally, in the domain of digital pathology, we investigate pathologists' attention during their examination of giga-pixel WSIs of prostate cancer with an objective to aid in the development of computer-assisted pathology training and clinical decision support systems. Using a digital microscope interface, we collected the largest known dataset of pathologist attention, which allows us to study the factors that guide their spatial and temporal attention patterns (where and when) and develop predictive models. Our study explores key factors guiding their attention, including magnification, slide staining, the nature of the diagnostic task, and their expertise. Motivated by this analysis, we propose deep learning models to solve two tasks: 1) predicting pathologist attention via spatial (heatmaps) and spatio-temporal (scanpaths) models, and 2) inferring pathologist expertise level, both essential technical components towards developing an AI-assisted pathology training pipeline.

Speaker:
Souradeep Chakraborty

Location: New Computer Science Bldg., Room 220

Zoom Link: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/9755288447?pwd=TW95T2xqOUZjRnlqcnVFcUQvN0JMdz09
Meeting ID: 975 528 8447
Passcode: 338037