https://meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.aspx?meet=naisys&year=20  


November 9 - 12, 2020 Virtual
Abstract Deadline: August 14, 2020


Organizers:

Raia Hadsell, DeepMind, United Kingdom
Blake Richards, Mila, Québec AI Institute, Canada
Anthony Zador, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

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The current COVID-19 situation is challenging and difficult for all of us - we hope this virtual conference will allow colleagues to share and discuss their latest research, while under travel and stay-at-home restrictions.

Because of the ongoing COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, CSHL and the organizers have now reached the difficult decision to restructure the meeting on From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems into a virtual meeting scheduled November 9-12, 2020.  NAISys will begin at 10 am (EDT)  on Monday, November 9 and ending with an afternoon session on Thursday, November 12, 2020. Oral sessions will be confined to later morning and afternoon sessions EST to maximize access by participants from around the world. 

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Artificial intelligence (AI) and neural networks have long drawn on neuroscience for inspiration. However, in spite of tremendous recent advances in AI, natural intelligence is still far more adept at interacting with the real world in real-time, adapting to changes, and doing so under significant physical and energetic constraints. The goal of this meeting is to bring together researchers at the intersection of AI and neuroscience, and to identify insights from neuroscience that can help catalyze the development of next-generation artificial systems.

Abstracts are welcomed on all scientific topics related to how principles and insights from neuroscience can lead to better artificial intelligence. Topics of interest include but are not limited to network architectures, computing with spiking networks, learning algorithms, active perception, inductive bias, meta-learning, and online learning. Please note that abstracts should be ONE page (~2900 characters).   




Keynote speakers (pending reconfirmation):Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montréal
Yann Lecun, NYU/Facebook


Invited Speakers (pending reconfirmation):Kwabena Boahen, Stanford University
Dmitri Chklovskii, Simons Foundation
Anne Churchland, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Claudia Clopath, Imperial College London, UK
Jim DiCarlo, MIT
Chelsea Finn, Stanford University
Surya Ganguli, Stanford University
Jeff Hawkins, Numenta
Konrad Kording, University of Pennsylvania
Timothy Lillicrap, DeepMind
Yael Niv, Princeton University
Bruno Olshausen, UC Berkeley
Cristina Savin, New York University
Terry Sejnowski, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Sebastian Seung, Princeton University
Eero Simoncelli, New York University
Sara A. Solla, Northwestern University
David Sussillo, Google Brain
Andreas Tolias, Baylor College of Medicine


New and revised abstracts should be submitted by the resubmission deadline, Friday, August 14. Individuals originally selected for talks should assume they will still be speaking, but we may select additional talks based on the number of invited and selected speakers who cannot reconfirm.

Abstracts should contain only new and unpublished material and must be submitted electronically by the abstract deadline. Selection of material for oral and poster presentation will be made by the organizers and individual session chairs. Status (talk/poster) of abstracts will be posted on our web site as soon as decisions have been made by the organizers.

We are eager to have as many students and postdocs as possible to attend since they are likely to benefit most from this meeting. We have applied for funds from industry and foundations to partially support graduate students and postdocs. Apply in writing stating need for financial support to Catie Carr at carr@cshl.edu. Preference is given to those submitting abstracts. 

All questions pertaining to registration, fees, abstract submission or any other matters may be directed to Catie Carr at carr@cshl.edu.

We anticipate the following support :

National Science Foundation

Social Media:

The designated hashtag for this meeting is #cshlNeuroAI. Note that you must obtain permission from an individual presenter before live-tweeting or discussing his/her talk, poster, or research results on social media. Click the Policies tab above to see our full Confidentiality & Reporting Policy.


Pricing:

Virtual Academic Package: $285
Virtual Graduate Student Package: $175
Virtual Corporate Package: $425

Lab Group Discounts (not departmental or institutional discounts):

Labs registering 4 people: 20% discount off applicable fees
Labs registering 5 people: 25% discount off applicable fees
Labs registering 6 people: 30% discount off applicable fees

To be eligible for lab group discounts, please submit a list of lab members planning to attend in advance of registration to Catie Carr  to establish appropriate discounted fees. Please include a link to your lab web page for verification purposes. Prior payments will be included in the group discount calculation.

IBRO/International Brain Research Organization are generously supporting the participation of a limited number of individuals from US/Canadian Minority Serving Institutions (check eligibility): $25
Limit: 65 attendees / limit per institution: 5 (contact Catie Carr  to confirm eligibility/availability prior to registering) 

Reduced Pricing for Individuals from US/Canadian Minority Serving Institutions (check eligibility): $50

Abstract: Human gaze behavior is a fundamental cue for understanding social intent, human-machine interaction, and cognitive processes. This thesis addresses the challenges of gaze target estimation (GTE), also known as gaze following, by developing a holistic understanding of gaze in complex environments.

The first part of this work improves GTE performance by introducing Patch-level Distribution Prediction (PDP). Unlike traditional models that rely on strict pixel-wise regression, PDP models gaze as a distribution over patches, which better accounts for annotation variance and bridges the gap between target location and in/out-of-frame prediction. To address the laborious nature of data labeling, the second part presents GCDR, the first semi-supervised method for gaze following. By prompting large Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to generate initial Grad-CAM heatmaps and refining them with a diffusion model, this method achieves high performance with significantly fewer human annotations. The third part expands the applicability of GTE to multi-camera environments. By introducing the Multi-View Gaze Target (MVGT) dataset, along with two novel frameworks for integrating information between multiple views and predicting the gaze target across views, we explore a new direction that overcomes single-view limitations such as face occlusion and out-of-view targets.

Building on these foundations, the final part of this thesis proposes a new direction toward semantic social gaze understanding using next-generation multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Rather than focusing solely on geometric gaze target localization, we aim to enrich gaze prediction with semantic and relational interpretation in complex social scenes. To this end, we will leverage existing gaze following datasets to derive social gaze supervision, including mutual gaze and shared attention, and obtain aligned language descriptions of scene-level gaze behaviors. This proposed work will enable the model to not only locate gaze targets but also predict structured social gaze relations among individuals, meanwhile generating a concise natural-language summary describing the dominant gaze interactions. By integrating spatial gaze estimation, social relation reasoning, and language-based scene understanding within a unified multimodal model, this work takes an important step toward a holistic understanding of human gaze behavior in real-world environments.

Speaker: Qiaomu Miao
Abstract: Capturing the spatio-temporal (4D) dynamics of humans has been a long standing research problem in computer vision and graphics. Synthesizing photorealistic human avatars has broad applications, ranging from immersive telepresence in AR/VR and the movie industry, to enriching the education and healthcare systems. Earlier approaches relied on hand-engineered models that use a small amount of data from one or more subjects. With the advent of neural networks, training on large datasets enhanced the output visual quality. Currently, the combination of neural networks with graphics techniques has achieved natural-looking human animation. However, most approaches are identity-specific, trained only on a single identity, and use only one modality.

In this dissertation, we address the problem of learning neural representations of humans in a holistic way. Given that the video data in the real world include multiple modalities (e.g., audio and video) and multiple identities, we develop multi-modal and multi-identity representations. First, we propose to reconstruct the 4D face geometry of humans by leveraging both audio and video information. In this way, the network produces accurate lip shapes and is robust to cases when either modality is insufficient. Next, we introduce a NeRF-based representation for audio-driven human face animation that achieves high-quality lip synchronization for cinematic content. Since humans communicate with their full body, combining body pose, hand gestures, and facial expressions, we extend the network to capture full-body human motion for multiple identities simultaneously. In order to better disentangle identity and non-identity specific information, we subsequently study non-linear interactions between latent factors of variation, and propose a specific multiplicative module. In this way, we learn a multi-identity NeRF that robustly animates human faces under novel expressions and achieves a significant decrease in the total training time. Similarly, we propose a multi-identity Gaussian splatting representation for human bodies, by constructing a high-order tensor. Assuming a low-rank structure, we learn a tensor decomposition that leads to a significant decrease in the total number of learnable parameters, as well as to a robust animation under novel poses. Last but not least, we propose to jointly synthesize audio and visual outputs from just text input. Given the recent rise of large language models, coupling text with natural-looking avatars can enhance the overall interaction between a human and an AI system.

Location: NCS 220 or Zoom

The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held from February 25 to March 4, 2025 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. More information can be found here.

Abstract: Millions of individuals living in disadvantaged communities are burdened by poverty, illegal drug activities, health concerns, and the lack of reliable and affordable access to facilities (e.g., schools, hospitals, and transit stations). To address these societal problems efficiently with broad support, initiatives have called to engage agents (e.g., residents, community leaders, or stakeholders) and consider their preferences on community improvement decisions to make collective community decisions. In this talk, we will focus on our ongoing AI-empowered collective decision-making approaches to improve the accessibility of individuals to facilities by (a) locating facilities to provide essential services and (b) strengthening existing infrastructures via structural modifications (e.g., constructing new roads, bridges, multi-use paths, or shuttle services) subject to individuals' preferences on the locations of the facilities and which communities to improve access, respectively. In particular, we will discuss our (theoretical and algorithmic) studies on modeling these approaches under several settings (e.g., accounting for fairness and agent preferences) and designing fair, transparent, strategy proof, and (approximately) optimal mechanisms to elicit (true) individual preferences and determine collective community decisions in order to improve facility accessibility. Finally, we will discuss other ongoing and future collective decision-making efforts in urban planning and public health (i.e., our recent studies on substance use research) to improve communities.

Bio: Hau Chan is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2015 and completed three years of Postdoctoral Fellowships, including at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University in 2018. His main research lies in multi-agent aspects of AI for Society and Social Good, focusing on developing modeling and algorithmic foundations for tackling societal problems involving agents and predicting agent behavior in societal contexts, leveraging AI, game theory, mechanism design, and machine learning to better inform policymaking and (collective) decision-making. His team has been addressing societal challenges and fairness issues in various domains, including security (e.g., reducing vulnerability), public health (e.g., reducing substance use and homelessness), and urban planning (e.g., improving accessibility to public facilities), collaborating with domain experts. His research has been supported by NSF, NIH, and USCYBERCOM. He has received several Best Paper Awards at SDM and AAMAS and distinguished/outstanding SPC/PC member recognitions at IJCAI and WSDM. He has given tutorials and talks on computational game theory and mechanism design at venues such as AAMAS and IJCAI, including an Early Career Spotlight at IJCAI 2022. He has served as co-chairs for the AI and Social Good Track, Demonstration Track, Student Activities, Doctoral Consortium, Job Fair, Scholarships, Finance, and Diversity & Inclusion Activities at AAAI, AAMAS, and IJCAI.

Location: Old Computer Science, room 1310

How do you get the most out of generative AI? Stop by the library Galleria outside of the Central Reading Room to learn more! Librarians Chris Kretz and Ahmad Pratama, along with David Ecker of DoIT, will be demonstrating tools and tips for writing prompts that make the most of what AI can do. And they'll be hosting Explore AI demos this Monday - Wednesday (March 3rd-5th) 12:30 - 1:30. Whether you're new to AI or a current user, they'd love to talk to you about it.

Location: Melville Library Galleria
The Antonija Prelec Memorial Committee in collaboration with Stony Brook University Libraries are very excited to bring you the 2019 Prelec Memorial Lecture! This year, we are pleased to announce our speaker is Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, Director of the National Library of Medicine.

No registration required. Find more information 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.

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.

Abstract: The increasing complexity and volume of data from electron microscopy necessitates advanced computational tools for timely and accurate analysis. In this talk, I will present several machine learning (ML) models developed to interpret diverse datasets from transmission electron microscopy (TEM). First, I demonstrate segmentation models for labelling regions of interest from in situ TEM images, such as atomic column positions or reaction sites that allow atomic-level quantitative analysis of data. Second, I introduce a self-supervised CNN model for denoising of low-dose HRTEM images, enabling clearer visualization of atomic features without sacrificing temporal resolution. Finally, a transformer-based model trained to predict copper oxidation states directly from their electron energy loss spectroscopy spectra will be introduced. Together, these projects showcase the power of tailored ML solutions to extract quantitative insights from complex microscopy data.

Biography: Brian Lee is a research associate working for the Electron Microscopy group and Theory and Computation group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Previously, he has received PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University and worked as a postdoc at Purdue University. His research focuses on applying machine learning and simulation techniques for materials science.

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