Educational objectives:
  1. Describe the data modalities available in All of Us (EHR, genomics, wearables) and explainhow OMOP CDM standardization enables reproducible cohort definitions across CDRversions.
  2. Evaluate the role of AI-assisted coding tools in accelerating the research-to-manuscriptpipeline while maintaining investigator oversight and scientific rigor.
  3. Apply a secure two-environment workflow to distinguish between exportable code artifactsand environment-bound data outputs when working within controlled-access researchplatforms.


Speaker: Hants Williams, Ph.D., R.N., Applied Health Informatics, Stony Brook University

Location: MART Building, Room: 7M-0602 (7th Floor)

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

  • CEWIT's 6th annual hackathon sponsored by Major League Hacking, Hack@CEWIT2022, is taking place virtually on February 18-20, 2022. This year's theme is Hacking Into the Metaverse and will focus on NFT's, Blockchain, Crypto, and the Metaverse. To find out more about the event, mentoring, sponsoring, or to register, visit:

  • https://www.cewit.org/programs/events/hack.php

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 Office of Proposal Development is pleased to announce the next installation of the series, Translating the Funding Landscape for Stony Brook Researchers. This virtual presentation series is designed to inform the Stony Brook University research community about funding trends across key topic areas. Our Strategic Research Initiatives team will provide insight into the current funding environment using policy briefs, budget priorities, and relevant legislation. We will highlight federal and state priorities for the current and upcoming years to help Stony Brook researchers develop strategies for pursuing funding in a competitive environment. This series is moderated by Mónica Bugallo, Interim Vice President for Research & Innovation.

Join us for the third in the series, focused on artificial intelligence:

Translating the Funding Landscape for Stony Brook Researchers: Artificial Intelligence

Presented by Catherine Chen, PhD, Research Development Associate

Faculty Respondent: Nav Nidhi Rajput, Assistant Professor, Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering

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/
Title: Cultural Biases, World Languages, and User Privacy in Large Language Models
Abstract: In this talk, I will highlight three key aspects of large language models: (1) cultural bias in LLMs and pre-training data, (2) decoding algorithm for low-resource languages, and (3) human-centered design for real-world applications.

The first part focuses on systematically assessing LLMs' favoritism towards Western culture. We take an entity-centric approach to measure the cultural biases among LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Aya, and mT5) through natural prompts, story generation, sentiment analysis, and named entity tasks. One interesting finding is that a potential cause of cultural biases in LLMs is the extensive use and upsampling of Wikipedia data during the pre-training of almost all LLMs. The second part will introduce a constrained decoding algorithm that can facilitate the generation of high-quality synthetic training data for fine-grained prediction tasks (e.g., named entity recognition, event extraction). This approach outperforms GPT-4 on many non-English languages, particularly low-resource African languages. Lastly, I will showcase an LLM-powered privacy preservation tool designed to safeguard users against the disclosure of personal information. I will share findings from an HCI user study that involves real Reddit users utilizing our tool, which in turn informs our ongoing efforts to improve the design of AI models.
Bio:

Wei Xu is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing and Machine Learning Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is the director of the NLP X Lab. Her research interests are in natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on Generative AI, robustness and fairness of large language models, multilingual LLMs, as well as AI for science, education, accessibility, and privacy research. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Google Academic Research Award, CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Award, Best Paper Awards and Honorable Mentions at COLING'18, ACL'23, ACL'24. She also received research funds from DARPA and IARPA. She is currently an executive board member of NAACL. Join Zoom Meeting https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/98855994362?pwd=F2qnpwL85fhCBHAEW9ZBpXihfwGHsj.1 (ID: 98855994362, passcode: 172797) Join by phone (US) +1 646-876-9923 (passcode: 172797) Joining instructions: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://applications.zoom.us/addon/invitation/detail?meetingUuid%3DuDJcUTvyQueZkCaUSAwFlg%253D%253D%26signature%3Da3d49e0f7f2e74e7130f7308c74bd85ba7b99587b98ba2e34238bb657ca51a09%26v%3D1&sa=D&source=calendar&usg=AOvVaw2jTn5cjfRG8vXU8KHHlU2Y Meeting host: H.Andrew.Schwartz@stonybrook.edu

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/98855994362?pwd=F2qnpwL85fhCBHAEW9ZBpXihfwGHsj.1

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: AI agents are increasingly deployed in complex, interactive environments, yet their runtime remains a major bottleneck for training, evaluation, and real-world use. Typical agent behavior unfolds sequentially, where each action requires an API call that can incur substantial latency. For example, a game of chess between two state-of-the-art agents can take hours. We introduce speculative actions, a lossless acceleration framework for general agentic systems. Inspired by speculative execution in microprocessors and speculative decoding in LLM inference, our method uses faster models to predict likely future actions and executes them in parallel, committing only when predictions match. We evaluate speculative actions across gaming, e-commerce, and web search environments, and additionally study a lossy extension in an operating systems setting. Across domains, we achieve up to 55% next-action prediction accuracy, translating into substantial latency reductions. Finally, we present a cost-latency analysis that formalizes the tradeoff between speculative breadth and time savings. This analysis enables principled tuning and selective branch launching, to ensure multi-branch speculation delivers practical speedups without prohibitive cost growth.

Speaker: Kehan Qi

Location: Old Computer Science Building - CS2311

ChatGPT for Developing Interactional Competence: Affordances and Constraints
MIC Distinguished Lecture Series

Abstract: The advent of ChatGPT has redrawn the boundary of pedagogical discourse, where the dyadic configuration of teacher-student has, for many, become triadic -- one that includes AI as an relevant third party, not to be missed or dismissed. Within applied linguistics, AI-focused research has predominantly targeted the teaching and learning of writing (Fang & Han, 2025). The work on AI and speaking, on the other hand, has largely involved perception studies documenting its positive impact on learners' willingness to communicate (Goh & Aryadoust, 2025). In this talk, I explore the role of AI in the teaching and learning of speaking, and in particular, the development of interactional competence. Based on a corpus of learner-AI interactions, I demonstrate the ways in which ChatGPT excels and fails at acting as a useful conversation partner, with a view towards furthering our ongoing deliberation on the affordances and constraints of AI in language education.

Speaker: Hansun Zhang Waring is Professor of Linguistics and Education at Columbia University and founder The Language and Social Interaction Working Group (LANSI). As an applied linguist and a conversation analyst, Hansun is interested in all things interaction -- (second language) pedagogical interaction, communication with the public, parent-child interaction, and human-AI interaction (HAI). Her work has appeared in leading journals in applied linguistics and discourse analysis as well as numerous book volumes, some of which she (co-)authored or co-edited. She is on the editorial boards of Chinese Language and Discourse (CLD), Classroom Discourse (CD), and International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL).

Location: HUM 1006

Abstract : Humans reason about everyday situations by making commonsense-based inferences, derived both from explicitly stated information and implicit, unstated knowledge. In this thesis, I investigate whether NLP models have different aspects of causal knowledge about events and how to improve their understanding of narratives and plans.
Answering questions about why people perform actions in a narrative can test whether NLP systems contain and can effectively apply causal knowledge about events. I introduce TellMeWhy, a dataset concerning why characters in short narratives perform the actions described. An evaluation of then SOTA finetuned models show that they are far worse than humans. To improve models, it is important to understand what aspects of causal knowledge they need and how to best use external sources to inject this knowledge. In KnowWhy, I analyze different ways of injecting knowledge into models, which is difficult since we do not know apriori what type of knowledge will be needed to answer a question, hence requiring a ranking model to pick the most important inference. Results show that this retrieved knowledge helps models of all sizes, thereby improving their understanding of narratives.
Next, I study whether models can reason about causal aspects of plans. I focus on testing whether they understand the underlying causal dependencies reflected in the temporal order of a plan's steps. I introduce CAT-Bench, and find that SOTA models are underwhelming, and that model answers are not consistent across questions about the same step pairs. In their current state, these models cannot yet reliably be used for complex user-facing tasks. I then measure contemporary models' ability to perform user-facing and user-centric plan customization. I introduce the use of semi-symbolic edits in large language model (LLM) based agents and test several multi-LLM-agent architectures for plan customization. While LLMs still lack the ability to understand complex customization hints, my results suggest that LLM-based architectures may be worth exploring further for other customization applications. Finally, I distill complex reasoning capabilities into small language models (SLMs) using synthetic data that reflects a decomposition-then-editing process for plan customization. I demonstrate that explicitly teaching this latent causal reasoning significantly improves the quality of SLM-generated customizations. Overall, my work has improved how well NLP models understand complex reasoning associated with events in different contexts.

Speaker: Yash Kumar Lal

Location: NCS 220 or Zoom https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/95849648243?pwd=dgPpZtDpgwQrK9z1SaPpNbBifaorzk.1