University Libraries Presents: Do you want more control over when to use AI features in your Google apps and when browsing online? Are you tired of Gmail trying to finish your sentences for you? Drop in to this brief tutorial, which will walk through the settings you can turn on and off in various Google products to keep your agency where you want it.

Register here for the Zoom session.

Abstract: Modern decision-making increasingly relies on complex data, imperfect models, and limited domain expertise--yet decisions must still be made with confidence and accountability. This talk presents a research perspective on visual analytics as a bridge between data, models, and human judgment. Through three case studies spanning public-health risk analysis, multivariate scientific visualization, and causal model auditing with large language models, I will show how interactive visualization can reveal structure in high-dimensional data, support reasoning under uncertainty, and help humans critically assess both statistical and AI-generated explanations. Together, these examples illustrate how visual analytics enables users not only to explore data, but to form, challenge, and refine beliefs that underpin scientific and societal decisions.

Bio: Klaus Mueller received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Ohio State University in 1998. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University and a Senior Scientist at the Computational Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He currently serves as the Acting Chair of the Department of Technology and Society at Stony Brook. From 2012 to 2015, he was the Founding Chair of the Computer Science Department at SUNY Korea, where he also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Finance for two years.
His research interests span visual analytics, explainable AI, machine learning and data science, human-centered responsible AI, fairness, belief modeling and personalized communication, virtual and augmented reality, and computational and medical imaging. Dr. Mueller received the U.S. National Science Foundation Early Career Award in 2001, the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity in 2011, and the Meritorious Service Certificate and Golden Core Award of the IEEE Computer Society in 2016. In 2018, he was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Inventors.
To date, he has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, which have been cited over 15,000 times. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences, has organized or participated in 18 tutorials, chaired the IEEE Visualization Conference in 2009, served as elected Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Computer Graphics (VGTC) from 2012-2015, and was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics from 2019-2022. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Location: NCS 120
University Libraries Presents: The Library AI Club is a welcoming space for students, faculty, and staff to explore AI in a supportive, low-pressure environment. Meeting every two weeks, the club features discussions, collaborative projects, guest speakers, and hands-on experiments. Join us to learn, share ideas, and engage with AI responsibly and creatively. We'd love to see you at an upcoming meeting! Location: Melville Library, Scholarly Communication Seminar Room
Time: May 5, 2022, Thursday, 02:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Place: New Computer Science (NCS) Room 220, and Zoom

Zoom link: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/95948672934?pwd=d3ZDcUJkK3VweFBDVWhIVDhtaFU2Zz09
Meeting ID:  959 4867 2934
Passcode:  082036

Title:  Generative Adversarial Learning using Optimal Transport

Abstract: 

Generative Adversarial Learning (GAL) aims to learn a target distribution in an adversarial manner. A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a concrete implementation of GAL using a discriminator and a generator that play a min-max game. GANs have been used in many machine learning and computer vision applications. However, GANs are known to be hard to train, mainly because a min-max saddle point optimization problem needs to be solved in GAL. In this thesis, I investigate several methods to improve generative adversarial learning using Optimal Transport (OT). 

Previous Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) do not compute the correct Wasserstein distance to train the discriminator. To address this problem, I propose WGAN-TS that uses the L1 transport cost and computes the correct Wasserstein distance to train the discriminator. To ensure the local convergence of WGANs, I propose WGAN-QC that adopts the quadratic transport cost. I prove that WGAN-QC not only computes the correct Wasserstein distance but also converges to a local equilibrium point. To compute the Wasserstein distance over the whole dataset, I propose to use Semi-Discrete Optimal Transport (SDOT) to match noise points and the real images during GAN training. To measure the quality of an SDOT map, I use the Maximum Relative Error (MRE) and the L_1 distance between the target distribution and the transported distribution obtained by an OT map. I propose statistical methods to estimate the MRE and the L_1 distance. I propose an efficient Epoch Gradient Descent algorithm for SDOT (SDOT-EGD). To deal with the 2D special case of GAL, I propose to use OT to learn 2D distributions. In particular, I adopt OT to match persistent diagrams in training a topology-aware GAN and learn density maps in the crowd counting task. Finally, I use OT and the topological maps of the crowd to improve the crowd counting performance and propose a topology-based metric to measure the quality of the crowd density maps.
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.
Abstract: Astronomers slowly made sense of the cosmos by following the stars night after night. I suggest we examine human identity in a similar way. Let's observe the words individuals use to describe themselves day after day. In this presentation, I will introduce ipseology - a new approach to studying human selves. Ipseology is the systematic, empirical study of ipseity: selfhood, individuality and the elements of identity. The primary idea is that we can learn a lot about people from their self-authored self-descriptions - especially if we follow their revisions over time. I will discuss results from sampling millions of social media bios over more than a decade and present new approaches for observation in the Post-API age.

Bio: Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones is a computational social scientist whose expertise includes online experiments, social networks, high-throughput text analysis and machine learning. He is interested in humans' perceptions of themselves and the developing role of artificial intelligence in society.

Dr. Jones is the director of CSSERG (pronounced sea surge): the Computational Social Science of Emerging Realities Group. CSSERG is a team of scholars committed to cross-disciplinary collaboration, united by common computational methodologies and always with eyes on the near future. CSSERG has studied the effectiveness of virtual reality in evoking empathy, the dynamics of gender stereotypes in language over decades and temporal trends in personally expressed identity.

This seminar will take place in person and online (zoom link below):

Join Zoom Meeting
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/93686609778?pwd=KdHVyIbU3ymML6hTchXsm6JLYKLSru.1

Meeting ID: 936 8660 9778
Passcode: 638699
Mind Brain Lecture: Constructing the World of Taste in Your Head You fork the morsel into your mouth and say yum...chocolate cake. The appreciation of your dessert's taste seems to follow directly, quickly and simply from the placement of the food on your tongue. The truth, however, is far more interesting and complex: your brain actually begins determining whether you will enjoy a bite of food even before the fork approaches your mouth and continues to work the problem well after. Information about your food's color, smell, texture and taste activates multiple parts of your brain, where that information collides with your pre-mouthful beliefs about how it should taste. The coming-together and shuffling of that information around the brain takes time, as networks of neurons work together to help you decide whether the morsel in your mouth is worth swallowing. Referring to work from psychology, biology and computational neuroscience, Professor Katz will de-mystify and reveal the beauty of these complexities of the neuroscience of taste. Donald Katz, Professor of Psychology, Departments of Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University Free presentation intended for a general audience. Reception to follow. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/mind/
Synthetic Dreams and Ghost Machines

Dr. Steven Skiena will join the Cinema for a presentation exploring the rapidly evolving worlds of artificial intelligence and robotics.

Dr. Skiena is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. A leading researcher in data science and algorithms, he is the author of several influential books on AI and computation, including The Algorithm Design Manual and The Data Science Design Manual.

The presentation will be followed by a screening of Ex Machina, Alex Garland's provocative science-fiction thriller exploring the seductive and unsettling boundaries between human consciousness and artificial intelligence.