Abstract: Modern technologies enable enhanced integrity and privacy guarantees not just for data, but also for computation. This is perhaps most emphatically demonstrated by the steady rise of zero-knowledge proofs, which are short certificates that attest to the correctness of computations (e.g., an age verification check) without revealing any secret inputs (e.g., the birth date on a digital ID). This subtly powerful technology enables anonymous credentials, privacy-preserving machine learning, anonymous blockchains, and much more--making the question of efficient zero-knowledge proofs fundamental to modern secure systems. Echoing Moore's law for computing, zero-knowledge proofs have improved on this front by ten orders of magnitude in the last two decades. In this talk, I will discuss our work on overcoming a key bottleneck that has emerged in this development: memory efficiency.

Speaker: Abhiram Kothapalli is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted by Sanjam Garg. He is a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science, advised by Bryan Parno. Previously, he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his B.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Mathematics. Kothapalli's research develops cryptographic techniques aimed at scaling expressive privacy and integrity guarantees across the internet.

Location: NCS 120

Designed for faculty, staff, presidents, provosts, academic leaders, student affairs professionals, IT specialists, librarians, researchers, administrators, institutional decision-makers, and other higher education stakeholders, the conference highlights practical strategies institutions can implement now while exploring longer-term governance, policy, and ethical considerations. Participants will leave with concrete tools, cross-institutional insights, and collaborative connections that support mission-aligned AI innovation.

Hosted by: AAC&U

Location: Atlanta, GA and Virtual

Register here.





https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/91775729097pwd=Qlc5Nks0NmlyKzJwMjR0S0hrdVZ3QT09

Meeting ID: 917 7572 9097
Passcode: 555459


Abstract: As the saying goes, there are many ways to skin a cat.
While we don't want to go around skinning cats, the world of
optimization is rich with different problems, problem formulations,
and methods and approaches, each with different guarantees and
computational benefits. In this talk we will take a tour down the
problem of structured sparsity in sensing to see how one simple
problem can inspire a wide range of analysis and tools. First, I will
present the optimality conditions for a generalized structured sparse
problem, which can be geometrically visualized as alignment of vectors
and matrices. Then I will introduce three approximation methods for
the problem of phase retrieval, which are a twist on stochastic
gradient and coordinate descent methods. These methods leverage
fundamental numerical linear algebra concepts to give fast approximate
solutions to large-scale problems, which then after postprocessing can
produce more reliable sensing results.

Bio: Yifan Sun received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the
University of California Los Angeles in 2015, with research focusing
on convex optimization and semidefinite programming. She was then
Technicolor Research and Innovation, focusing on machine learning and
data science applications. More recently, she completed two postdocs,
at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and
L'Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique
(INRIA) in Paris, France.

Join the Department of Biomedical Informatics for an exclusive fall semester programming bootcamp. Discover essential programming, data analytics, and machine learning skills crucial for biomedical informatics. Special topics such as Bioinformatics and NLP will be briefly covered.

Gain hands-on programming experience and discover diverse career opportunities in biomedical informatics.

Don't miss this chance to excel in healthcare data analytics and shape the future of the industry.

https://bmi.stonybrookmedicine.edu/Bootcamp/Bootcamp-Fall-2025

Location: NCS 120

Abstract: Recent studies have highlighted the vulnerability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to backdoor attacks, posing significant security risks. Understanding these attack strategies is crucial for assessing model robustness and developing effective defenses. This thesis proposal aims to investigate the vulnerability of language and vision-language models, analyze abnormal behaviors in backdoor-attacked models, and develop defense methods to enhance safety of modern machine learning models at deployment.


We investigate the internal mechanisms of backdoored NLP models, identifying a distinct attention focus drifting phenomenon, where trigger tokens hijack attention regardless of the input context. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we provide insights into the underlying mechanisms that enable backdoor attacks. Building on these insights, we propose detection methods to differentiate backdoored models from clean ones, through inspecting both the attention distribution and the model predictions. To better understand the vulnerability, we develop advanced backdoor attack strategies targeting language models in classification tasks. For BERT variants, we introduce Trojan Attention Loss (TAL), a novel method that directly manipulates attention patterns to enhance backdoor effectiveness, ensuring stealth and robustness. Vision-Language Models have demonstrated strong performance in recent years. Yet their vulnerability is largely underexplored. We investigate advanced backdoor attack strategies on Vision-Language Models, focusing on image-to-text generation tasks. We demonstrate how backdoors can be embedded in complex multimodal tasks while maintaining semantic integrity under poisoned inputs. Additionally, we propose innovative techniques for injecting backdoors without requiring access to the original training data, expanding the feasibility of real-world attacks.

This proposal provides novel insights into the internal mechanisms of backdoored models, propose effective detection strategies, and develop advanced attack techniques that expose critical vulnerabilities. These findings underscore the urgent need for robust security measures to defend against emerging backdoor threats in deep learning models. The results have been published in top venues including ICLR, ECCV, NAACL, EMNLP, etc.

Speaker: Weimin Lyu


Zoom link: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/99880605139?pwd=cfWbRG6n9v3GXEa7OqvXa5cOp5eLBv.1
Meeting ID: 998 8060 5139
Passcode: 843302

Abstract:

In recent years, the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) has been reshaped by the rapid emergence of Foundation Models (FMs). These versatile models have garnered widespread attention for their remarkable ability to transcend the boundaries of traditional, bespoke AI solutions and to generalize to a large set of downstream tasks. In this presentation we will describe the development of geospatial FMs with earth observation and weather data and discuss initial results of such models. We will also show how such foundation models can be a new and exciting tool for assisting with and accelerating scientific discovery.

Speaker:

Hendrik Hamann
Distinguished Researcher
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Join us to share your thoughts about teaching, learning, and AI!

The landscape of higher education is rapidly evolving with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Through the Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum with AAC&U, we are exploring ways that we can better address AI in teaching and learning. We want to hear your experiences, your concerns, and your ideas.

This is an open discussion for all faculty and staff to share their perspectives on the opportunities and challenges AI presents in our academic environment.

We'll be exploring critical questions like:
  • In the age of AI, what are the opportunities you see for enriching the classroom and curriculum? How can it enhance student learning or your professional practice?
  • What are the most significant challenges and concerns that AI raises for you regarding academics, student integrity, or your workload?
  • What resources (tools, training, technical support, policy guidance, etc.) do you need to feel confident and successful in the age of AI?
Date: Monday, December 1st
Time: 12:30pm-1:45pm
Location: West Campus - Melville Library, Special Collections Seminar Room (the room is to the left at the top of the first flight of stairs from the Melville lobby)
or
Date: Wednesday, December 3rd
Time: 10:30am-11:45am
Location: East Campus - HSC 2-154

Please register in advance so we can confirm the room.

Note: Videos will not be shared publicly and comments will only be shared in aggregate.

Your input is vital. From pedagogy to assessment, your insights will be critical. We look forward to a thoughtful and productive conversation!
  • Dr. Rose Tirotta-Esposito (Assistant Provost; Director of CELT)
  • Dr. Elizabeth Hewitt (Associate Professor in the Department of Technology and Society (DTS) in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
  • Chris Kretz (Associate Librarian and Head of Academic Engagement at SBU Libraries)
  • Prof. Rajiv Lajmi (Assistant Professor in the School of Health Professions and Chair of Applied Health Informatics)
  • Dr. Matthew Salzano (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication in the School of Communication and Journalism)
How Language Makes us Smart (without Big Data) presented by Charles Yang

Abstract: Language provides the glue that combines simpler concepts into complex ones. To study how language guides conceptual development, we need precise accounts of how rules are learned from the child's linguistic experience, which is extremely limited in comparison to the amount of data available to current machine learning methods. In this talk, I discuss a mathematical model of inductive generalization, which enables language learning with very small amount of data. Such a view of learning has strong implications for the cross-cultural/linguistic variation of development. As a case study, I show that Hong Kong children learning Cantonese, which has a relatively simpler formal counting system, develop understanding of symbolic numbers a full year ahead of English-learning children in the United States, which is precisely predictable from the learning model. The new conception of learning adds another wrinkle to the eternal question of how language and thought are related to each other.

Bio: Charles Yang studied at the MIT AI lab and now teaches linguistics, computer science and psychology and directs the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books: The Price of Linguistic Productivity (2016 MIT Press) won the Leonard Bloomfield Award from the Linguistic Society of America. His honors include a Guggenheim fellowship.
Since 2021, IIAC has gathered the heads of nations, fabs, and faculties who shape how intelligence is built into the physical world. After four editions at Stanford and a 2025 convening in Ha Noi, the fifth moves to Tokyo for a single, deliberate day on the question beneath every other question: who governs the intelligence that runs the factory, the grid, and the supply chain?

Keynote speakers: Christopher Nguyen (Aitomatic), Yann LeCun (AMI Labs), Akihisa Shiozaki (House of Representatives, Japan), Suresh Venkatarayalu (Honeywell), Jimmy Rhee (ASI Foundry), and Toshikazu Okuya (Commerce and Information Policy Bureau).

Register here to attend.