The Association for Computational Linguistics is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. Membership includes the ACL quarterly journals, Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the ACL, reduced registration at most ACL-sponsored conferences, discounts on ACL-sponsored publications, and participation in ACL Special Interest Groups.

An annual meeting is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out.

For more information and registration, visit the official website.

Talk Title: Knowledge-enhanced LLMs and Human-AI Collaboration Frameworks for Creativity Support


Abstract:

Large language models (LLMs) constitute a paradigm shift in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. To build AI systems that are human-centered, I propose we need knowledge-aware models and human-AI collaboration frameworks to help them solve tasks ultimately aligning these models better with human values. In this talk, I will discuss my research agenda for human-centered AI with a case study on creativity that focuses on how to augment LMs with external knowledge, build effective human-AI collaboration frameworks as well as theoretically grounded robust evaluation protocols for measuring capabilities of NLG systems. I will begin by describing knowledge-enhanced methods for creative text generation such as metaphors. Next, I will describe how content creators can collaborate and benefit from the creative capabilities of text-to-image-based AI models. Finally, I will focus on the design and development of theoretically grounded evaluation protocols to benchmark the creative capabilities of Large Language Models in both producing as well as assessing creative text. I will end this talk by highlighting the current limitations of existing models and future directions toward building better models that will enable efficient and trustworthy human-AI collaboration systems.


Bio:

Tuhin Chakrabarty is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Natural Language Processing group within the Computer Science department at Columbia University. His research is supported by the Columbia Center of Artificial Intelligence & Technology (CAIT) & an Amazon Science Ph.D. Fellowship. He was also a Computational Journalism fellow at NYTimes R&D and an intern at the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Salesforce Research, and Deepmind. His research interests are broadly in Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Human-Computer Interaction with a special focus on Human-Centered Methods for Understanding, Generation, and Evaluation of Creativity. His work has been recognized at top natural language processing and human-computer interaction conferences and journals such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, TACL, and CHI. He has been involved in organizing several workshops and tutorials at NLP conferences such Figurative Language Processing workshop at EMNLP 2022, NAACL 2024, and the tutorial on Creative Text Generation at EMNLP 2023. His work on AI and creativity has been mentioned in mainstream news media such as The Hollywood Reporter and more recently The Washington Post.

Join Zoom Meeting https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/97103601583?pwd=TnpGMXdpeEd1N0hZcXppS1BLNFJhZz09 (ID: 97103601583, passcode: 004031) Join by phone (US) +1 646-931-3860 (passcode: 004031) Joining instructions: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://applications.zoom.us/addon/invitation/detail?meetingUuid%3DILacj94mRvSXgTYt0Cqs1w%253D%253D%26signature%3D9f2f1e7e603bbcb9034724d084eea8846c19a38b7436180170dfc3f1d718b425%26v%3D1&sa=D&source=calendar&usg=AOvVaw3MsNgLSPMRl8L5i6BosYrB Meeting host: H.Andrew.Schwartz@stonybrook.edu

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CSE 600 Seminar Series | Fall 2025


Abstract: The first part of the presentation focuses on the fundamental role that failures play in the Ph.D. journey, highlighting how they offer invaluable learning experiences to build resilience, critical thinking, and adaptability. Instead of viewing failures as signs of inadequacy, they should be recognized as opportunities to learn, re-evaluate, and develop the persistence needed for success in a high-stakes research environment. In the second part of the presentation, we take a quick look at the evolution of distributed databases research at Stony Brook and then focus on different challenges associated with distributed transaction processing systems functioning in untrustworthy environments. Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have recently been extensively used by distributed transaction processing systems to establish consensus on the order of transactions. However, the proliferation of different BFT protocols has made it difficult to navigate the BFT landscape, let alone determine the protocol that best meets application needs. Moreover, as novel applications, modern hardware, and new cloud platforms arise, distributed transaction processing systems need to be designed with full-stack adaptivity in mind. This presentation discusses our vision for a reinforcement learning (RL)-based distributed transaction processing system that adjusts effectively in real time to dynamic fault scenarios and evolving workloads.

Bio: Mohammad Javad Amiri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. Before joining Stony Brook, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research mainly lies at the intersection of data management and distributed systems, focusing on distributed transaction processing, consensus protocols, and blockchains.
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.
Abstract: Formalization of mathematics is the process by which pen-and-paper mathematics is translated into a strict chain of logical deductions down to the axioms of mathematics. The subject has seen renewed interest in the last decades thanks to the development of computer systems called proof assistants, which make this feasible in practice.
There have now been several examples of high-profile mathematical results which have been formalized. In principle, any mathematical domain is accessible. However, existing projects are skewed towards algebra instead of analysis. Notable exceptions are a project which formalized enough of Gromov's convex integration theory to deduce Smale's sphere eversion theorem and the ongoing project to formalize Carleson's convergence theorem for Fourier series.
This workshop will bring together formalization experts and interested mathematicians to give a new impulse to formalization of analysis (in a very broad sense), and to develop abstractions and tools to deduplicate effort.

Application Information: ICERM welcomes applications from faculty, postdocs, graduate students, industry scientists, and other researchers who wish to participate. Some funding may be available for travel and lodging. Graduate students who apply must have their advisor submit a statement of support in order to be considered.

The deadline to apply for this workshop is January 24, 2026.

https://icerm.brown.edu/program/topical_workshop/tw-26-ttfa

Virtual Talk: Contextual Modeling for Natural Language Understanding, Generation and Grounding by Rui Zhang

Zoom link to come.

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 PhD 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 and CoNLL. During his PhD, 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.
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.
Predictable Autonomy for Cyber-Physical Systems by Stanley Bak, Safe Sky Analytics

ABSTRACT: Cyber-physical systems combine complex physics with complex software. Although these systems offer significant potential in fields such as smart grid design, autonomous robotics and medical systems, verification of CPS designs remains challenging. Model-based design permits simulations to be used to explore potential system behaviors, but individual simulations do not provide full coverage of what the system can do. In particular, simulations cannot guarantee the absence of unsafe behaviors, which is unsettling as many CPS are safety-critical systems.

The goal of set-based analysis methods is to explore a system's behaviors using sets of states, rather than individual states. The usual downside of this approach is that set-based analysis methods are limited in scalability, working only for very small models. This talk describes our recent process on improving the scalability of set-based reachability computation for LTI hybrid automaton models, some of which can apply to very large systems (up to one billion continuous state variables!). Lastly, we'll discuss the significant overlap of techniques used for our scalable reachability analysis methods with set-based input/output analysis of neural networks.

BIO: Stanley Bak is a computer scientist investigating the predictable design of autonomous cyber-physical systems. He strives to develop practical formal methods that are both scalable and useful, which demands developing new theory, programming efficient tools and building experimental systems. He received a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2007 (summa cum laude), and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2009. He completed his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at UIUC in 2013. He received the Founders Award of Excellence for his undergraduate research at RPI in 2004, the Debra and Ira Cohen Graduate Fellowship from UIUC twice, in 2008 and 2009, and was awarded the Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship from 2009 to 2013. From 2013 to 2018, Stanley was a Research Computer Scientist at the US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), both in the Information Directorate in Rome, NY, and in the Aerospace Systems Directorate in Dayton, OH. He currently helps run Safe Sky Analytics, a research consulting company investigating verification and autonomous systems, and performs teaching as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.
Abstract: Sub-grid turbulence is challenging to resolve in climate models; therefore, it is parameterized. Traditionally, turbulent parameterizations have relied on physics-based and equation-based approaches. However, ad hoc and uncertain components in these parameterizations introduce uncertainty in future climate predictions. Recently, data-driven techniques have emerged as an alternative for modeling sub-grid fluxes. I will demonstrate the use of machine learning to model vertical turbulent fluxes in the ocean surface boundary layer and its impact on reducing biases in NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ocean climate model.

I will show how neural networks, trained to predict the eddy diffusivity profile from high-fidelity yet computationally expensive turbulence schemes, enhance the vertical mixing scheme in the climate model. These networks replace ad hoc components while maintaining the conservation principles of the standard ocean model equations. The enhanced scheme outperforms its predecessor by reducing biases in the mixed-layer depth and modestly improving tropical upper-ocean stratification in ocean-only global simulations. Furthermore, simplified equations that can replace the neural networks show similar improvements but with lower computational cost and better interpretability. They point to structural deficiencies in the baseline parameterization. This work is one of the first successful applications of machine learning to improve a sub-grid parameterization of turbulent mixing in ocean climate models.

IACS Seminar Speaker: Aakash Sane, Princeton University

Location: IACS Seminar Room or Zoom

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