Abstract: Traditional questionnaires remain the primary method for assessing psychological outcomes and beliefs, capturing individuals' and populations' inner states. This dissertation presents an alternative computational method that overcomes key limitations in current mental health monitoring, particularly in spatiotemporal resolution, responses to major events, and automatic belief identification. By analyzing ∼1 billion Tweets from 2 million geo-located users, we created a big data pipeline for estimating depression and anxiety at the county-week level. These Language-Based Mental Health Assessments (LBMHA) demonstrated higher reliability and validity than traditional survey measures. Our approach effectively captured mental health trends and highlighted significant increases in mental illness following major events. Using the LBMHA pipeline, we conducted quasi-experiments, research designs that simulate randomized control trials, to generate explanations for mental health changes due to COVID-19 incidence/death. Utilizing these time-series analyses, we conducted discontinuity forecasting for community-specific anxiety shifts using statistical learning via ensemble and contextual models. To likewise investigate individual internal states, we created a novel task and annotated dataset for self belief language identification. Our fine-tuned language model for self-belief classification, despite its relatively small scale, outperformed GPT-4o. The self belief topics identified by our model successfully predicted depression, anxiety, and stress, offering insights into the relationship between self-conceptualization and mental health. The adoption of scalable language-based assessments with modern distributed computation presents a promising avenue for advancing community and individual mental health research.

Speaker: Siddharth Mangalik

https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/91251321639?pwd=faggV5jZ7ByFDCFmnLXD3HiYxjQ1Eb.1&jst=2

Abstract: Much like other AI for Science domains, polymer design poses significant challenges. It requires grounding in empirical data and physical laws, precise handling of domain-specific structured representations, and compositional reasoning over multiple interacting constraints--all while working with limited data.

To address these limitations, we introduce PolyBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising over 125K polymer design and analysis tasks grounded in verified experimental and synthetic data. PolyBench includes tasks created from a wide range of data sources and presents diverse structural, property-driven, and synthesis-oriented reasoning problems. Tasks in PolyBench are organized from simple to complex analytical reasoning problems, enabling generalization tests and includes diagnostic probes to evaluate model capabilities. Additionally, to support effective domain alignment, we propose a knowledge-augmented reasoning distillation framework that enriches the dataset with structured chain-of-thought supervision derived from expert-informed reasoning strategies.

Small language models (7B-14B parameters) trained on PolyBench substantially outperform comparably sized baselines and, in many cases, exceed the performance of larger closed-source frontier models on polymer reasoning tasks, while also demonstrating improved transfer to external polymer benchmarks. Last, we conduct a diagnostic study that reveals a compositionality gap: despite strong performance on decomposed sub-questions, models struggle to integrate multiple interacting constraints and intermediate reasoning steps, highlighting fundamental limitations in current scientific language models.

Speaker: Dikshya Mohanty

Location: NCS 115/Online

Zoom: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/94746001760?pwd=BCAd8gu7cXLn3PXM6kkbh11V6r0Mr7.1
Meeting ID: 947 4600 1760 Passcode: 987917

CSE 600 Seminar Series | Fall 2025


Abstract: Virtual worlds are prevalent in applications ranging from entertainment, healthcare, retail, to workforce training. With the demand for virtual content growing exponentially, the market for such content is valued at over $200 Billion, which is accelerating the need for advanced computational solutions. In this talk, I will focus on a key challenge in virtual content creation: simulating autonomous agents.
I begin by overviewing this problem domain, through the lens of a physics-based dynamics simulation, which enables the simulation of thousands of agents at interactive rates with GPU programming, achieving a level of performance previously unattainable.
Next, I'll present our recent results in Deep Reinforcement Learning for multi-agent navigation, which enable refined, reward-based strategies to control agent movement. We demonstrate how these techniques can simulate realistic crowds, with broad applications in pedestrians, robots, and swarms. Lastly, I conclude my talk by discussing our lab's work-at-large and the wide range of research opportunities in this emerging area.

Speaker: Tomer Weiss is a professor with New Jersey Institute of Technology since 2020. He received the best student, presentation, and best paper awards in various ACM SIGGRAPH conferences for his work on simulating multi-agent crowds. He was also a finalist in both ACM SIGGRAPH Thesis Fast Forward, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Doctoral Symposium in 2018. He received his PhD in computer science from UCLA in 2018. His research interests include multi-agent dynamics, scene understanding, and interactive visual computing.
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.
ICB&DD 19th Annual Symposium

Iwao Ojima, Director, ICB&DD
Ivet Bahar Chair, Organizing Committee
Dima KozakovCo-Chair, OrganizingCommittee

There will be poster sessions on projects conducted in the ICB&DD member's laboratories aswell as other laboratories in the area. Awards will be given to the best three posters.

Please see the link for the registration and poster sessions in:
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/icbdd/https://forms.gle/Wh4UzVx9U4HWStXb8

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
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: In this talk, we take a step back and argue that many varied and seemingly unrelated attacks on the web are actually symptoms of one deeper problem that has existed since the web's inception. Whether it is attacks due to expired domain names, cloaking done by malicious websites, malvertising, or even our growing distrust of the news can be largely attributed back to the issue of stateless linking. Stateless linking refers to the absence of any integrity guarantees between the time that a link for a remote resource was created, to a future time when this link is resolved by web clients. We draw on 10+ years of research to demonstrate how stateless linking and the resulting lack of content integrity is the true culprit for many of our past, current, and likely future web problems. Successfully tackling this one really challenging problem, has the potential of solving many of our web woes.

Bio: Nick Nikiforakis is affiliated with the National Security Institute. He received his PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven in Belgium. He received his MSc, in Parallel and Distributed Systems and BSc in Computer Science from the University of Crete, Greece. His research focuses on web security and privacy, software security, and intrusion detection.

Location: NCS 120