The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is pleased to present a Machine Learning and Big Data workshop.

This workshop will focus on topics including big data analytics and machine learning with Spark, as well as deep learning.

This will be an IN PERSON event hosted by various satellite sites, there WILL NOT be a direct to desktop option for this event. SBU's Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) is one of those satellite sites!

Location: IACS Conference Room #2

Interested applicants must first have an ACCESS ID. If you don't have the ID, please visit this page to create one: ACCESS USER REGISTRATION.


Once you have an ACCESS ID, please login (see top right here) then register here.

Abstract: Computer vision seeks to extract semantic and geometric information from images and videos, serving as the perceptual foundation for intelligent systems such as robots and autonomous vehicles. Over the past decade, deep learning has driven remarkable progress in the field, advancing capabilities from 2D recognition to 3D reconstruction. However, the current purely data-driven paradigm faces fundamental challenges, including data inefficiency, curse of high dimensionality, and limited understanding of visual entities beyond individual objects.

In this talk, I will present my recent research on modeling and learning rich visual structures to address these challenges. First, I will introduce a novel framework that integrates explicit visual dependency modeling with deep learning for 2D and 3D dense prediction. Next, I will demonstrate how unfolding the manifold structure of visual data enables unsupervised semantic segmentation. Finally, I will present a recent project that represents, parses, and learns the geometric compositionality of 3D objects to facilitate self-supervised part-whole reconstruction. Through these efforts, I aim to bridge the gap between data-driven deep learning and visual structure modeling, paving the way for more efficient, generalizable, and interpretable computer vision models.

Bio: Dr. Wei Tang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University, where his dissertation was honored with a Best Dissertation Award. His research interests include computer vision, digital image processing, and machine learning. Dr. Tang has served as an associate editor for several international journals, including Pattern Recognition and Machine Vision and Applications, and as an area chair for leading conferences, including CVPR, ICCV, and WACV. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and industry partners such as Motorola and Wormpex AI Research.


Location: NCS 115

Zoom: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/4624091659?omn=95178138684&jst=3
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 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.
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods and computational materials science continue to make inroads into accelerated materials design and development. I will review Al-enabled advances made in the subfield of polymer informatics, with a particular focus on the design of application-specific practical polymeric materials. I will describe exemplar design attempts within a few critical and emerging application spaces, including materials designs for storing, producing, and conserving energy, and those that can prepare us for a sustainable economy powered by recyclable and/or biodegradable polymers. Al- powered workflows help efficiently search the staggeringly large chemical and configurational space of materials, using modern machine-learning (ML) algorithms to solve forward and inverse materials design problems. A practical informatics-based design protocol involves creating a set of application-specific target property criteria, building ML model predictors for those relevant target properties, enumerating or generating a tangible population of viable polymers, and selecting candidates that meet design recommendations. The protocol will be demonstrated for several energy and sustainability-related applications. Finally, I will offer an outlook on the lingering obstacles that must be overcome to achieve widespread adoption of informatics-driven protocols in industrial-scale materials development.

Speaker Bio:
Prof. Ramprasad is the Regents' Entrepreneur, Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in the School of Materials Science & Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also the CEO and co-founder of Matmerize, Inc. His area of expertise is the development and application of computational and machine learning tools to accelerate sustainable materials development aimed at energy production, storage and utilization. Prof. Ramprasad received his B. Tech. in Metallurgical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, an M.S. degree in Materials Science & Engineering at the Washington State University, and a Ph.D. degree also in Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Prof. Ramprasad is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and the Max Planck Society Fellowship for Distinguished Scientists. He has authored or co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, 8 book chapters and 8 patents, and has delivered over 300 invited talks at Universities and Conferences worldwide. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of npj Computational Materials, ACS Materials Letters and Journal of Physical Chemistry A/B/C. He created and chaired the inaugural 2022 Gordon Research Conference on Computational Materials Science and Engineering.

Location: Room 301, Engineering Building
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept -- it is here, but its development, benefits, and risks remain unevenly distributed across industries, nations, and social groups. In this talk, Jieshu presents her research on the societal dimensions of AI from two perspectives: the forces shaping AI's development (backward-looking) and its current and potential impact on society (forward-looking). She first examines disparities in AI, including women's underrepresentation in AI patents and the geographic concentration of AI innovation, highlighting inequalities in who creates AI and who benefits from it. She then explores AI's societal impact, focusing on workforce transformation and the need for GenAI literacy. She will also discuss AI patents, AI's role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, potential environmental biases in LLMs, and gender-specific patterns in AI portrayals in science fiction.

Bio: Jieshu Wang is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Arizona State University (ASU), focusing on the social dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI). With a background in engineering, economics, communication, and science and technology studies, she examines how AI both shapes and is shaped by broader societal forces. Her research employs interdisciplinary methods to explore the social, political, and economic factors influencing AI development, as well as its role in innovation, the economy, the future of work, climate change mitigation, and popular culture. Jieshu holds a Ph.D. in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology from ASU. She is also a science book translator and has translated six books.

Location: Old Computer Science, room 1310
Title: Class visual similarity based noisy sample removal in generative Few Shot Learning
Time: Thursday, Feb 4, 11:30am - 1:00pm
Zoom:
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/8563646526?pwd=anJna1gzUStXNlNVSUIzdDRUSC9CUT09

Meeting ID: 856 364 6526
Passcode: 203791



Abstract:  

Over the past decade, larger datasets, hardware accelerations, and network architecture improvements have contributed to phenomenal achievements in many tasks of computer

vision. However, in the absence of large datasets, computer vision models struggle to learn

general representations which results in poor performance. Few-shot learning tries to address 

this problem by proposing models which learn from a few examples.


I first give an overall review of few-shot learning methods. I particularly focus on generative Few Shot Learning(FSL) methods, which augment the scarce categories in a dataset by generating samples for those rare categories. As the actual class distribution can be complex and lie very close to each other, the sample generated for one class can be noisy or lie close to another class.  However, none of the current FS generative methods perform any form of quality control of the generated samples.


In this work, I propose to identify and remove the generated samples that are less likely to be in the distribution of the few-shot class. Here I particularly deal with few-shot scenarios where the

prior information of the relationship between the classes based on visual  similarity is available. The main idea is to exploit these priors to better identify the unreliable generated samples.


Particularly, I have proposed two methods based on class relationship to detect noisy generated samples. In the first method, we assume that the embedding space of each class follows a Gaussian distribution.  From this assumption, I propose Gaussian Neighborhood (GN), a method to estimate how likely a generated sample is drawn from the estimated distribution of a few-shot class.  We evaluate this method on the Hematopoiesis dataset.  By simply eliminating samples based on thresholding our proposed GN scores, the few-shot  classification  performance  is  improved by 5% and 2% in five shot and one shot respectively, compared to the model trained on all generated images. 


The GN scores represent the similarity distances from the generated samples to their classes, based on the assumption that each class is a Gaussian distribution.  However, this assumption might be strict in many scenarios since the real distributions of data can be arbitrarily complex.  Thus in my second proposed method, I aim to learn such similarity distances directly from data via metric learning. I propose to train a deep-network to regress the similarity distance between a pair of samples.  This network is trained using both the class-level  visual  similarity  information  and  the  class  labels.   This method improves the 1-shot and 5-shot classification performances by 0.5% and 1% respectively, compared to GN.

CSE 656 Seminar in Computer Vision 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 15 minutes) by multiple students. Students can register for 1 credit for CSE656. Registered students must attend and present a minimum of 2 talks. Everyone else is welcome to attend. Fill in https://forms.gle/q6UG9ygauLp2a8Po8 to subscribe to our mailing list for further announcement.
Abstract: The recent expansion of online sport wagering and igaming has led to higher rates of problem gambling, particularly among emerging adults and other population subgroups. The Center for Gambling Studies (CGS) at the Rutgers University, School of Social Work, is using big data analysis, machine learning and GIS mapping to identify geographic locations with populations most at risk to guide the development of targeted interventions. This presentation will review the GIS StoryMap for the State of New Jersey, including a blueprint for the highest risk target service areas in the state. It will also present findings from a machine learning model that identifies the key risk factors for high-intensity online casino bettors. Implications for prevention, treatment and policy initiatives will be discussed.

Bio: Lia Nower, J.D., Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor, Associate Dean for Research, and Director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University. A clinician and attorney, her research focuses on big data analysis and machine learning models for online gambling and sports wagering; gambling and video gaming among emerging adults; policy initiatives around harm reduction and responsible gambling, and etiology and treatment of problem gambling. Dr. Nower serves as a senior editor for Addiction. She has received both the Research (2019) and the Lifetime Research Award (2022) from the National Council on Problem Gambling and the Board of Trustees Award for Research (2022) from Rutgers University.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/95617197636?pwd=KytzZ2pVRG9SZGpKZUtpNXJISjNjZz09
Meeting ID: 956 1719 7636 Passcode: 924293