Millions, Billions, Zillions: Why (In)numeracy Matters by Brian Kernighan, Princeton University
2019 * 2020 Shutterstock Distinguished Lecture Series
What Does Learning Mean? presented by Jeffrey Heinz
ABSTRACT
When we develop learning algorithms, what computational problems are we solving? In this talk, I discuss different answers that have been proposed for this question, and discuss some of the consequences for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The main lessons I offer are that (1) feasible solutions to learning problems require careful consideration of a target class C of functions, (2) that such a class C cannot include all functions, or even all computable functions, and so many logically possible functions must be outside of C and (3) class C must have significant structure which the solutions take advantage of. These main ideas are motivated and illustrated from modeling language acquisition and the related problem of grammatical inference from example sequences belonging to formal languages.
ABSTRACT
When we develop learning algorithms, what computational problems are we solving? In this talk, I discuss different answers that have been proposed for this question, and discuss some of the consequences for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The main lessons I offer are that (1) feasible solutions to learning problems require careful consideration of a target class C of functions, (2) that such a class C cannot include all functions, or even all computable functions, and so many logically possible functions must be outside of C and (3) class C must have significant structure which the solutions take advantage of. These main ideas are motivated and illustrated from modeling language acquisition and the related problem of grammatical inference from example sequences belonging to formal languages.
The University's Main Commencement Ceremony will take place on Friday, May 23, 2025 at 11 am at Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium. Gates open at 10 am.
All guests need a valid ticket to enter LaValle Stadium - no exceptions. Children age 1 and older require a ticket. Seating is first-come, first-served.
Register here.
Face Editing with Machine Learning presented by Zhixin Shu
ABSTRACT: The face is the most informative feature of humans and has been a long-standing research topic in Computer Vision and Graphics. Images of faces are also ubiquitous in photography and social media, and people have devoted significant resources to capturing and editing face images. Face editing can be broadly viewed as the encoding, manipulation and the decoding of some representations for face images. The challenges are that we want to manipulate an image in a controllable way and generate results that are both desirable and as realistic as possible. This thesis explores different Machine Learning-based face-editing approaches. I discuss the role of machine learning for achieving desirable edits by learning both the physical aspects as well as the statistical manifold of human faces. In my work for eye-editing, I discuss the importance of understanding multiple physical elements of a face image, such as shape, illumination, pose, etc. In a deep-learning-based approach, I introduce image formation domain knowledge to the construction and training of a neural network. This network provides transparent access to the disentangled representations of the aforementioned physical properties. With this network, we can achieve various face editing tasks in forms of representation manipulation. After that, I introduce Deforming Autoencoders, a network that learns to disentangle shape and appearance in an unsupervised manner. This disentanglement is beneficial for the learning of some other factors of variations, such as illumination and facial expression. In an extension of Deforming Autoencoders, we incorporate non-rigid structure-from-motion to learn a 3D morphable model for faces that only requires an image set for training. At last, I describe an image-to-image network for 3D face reconstruction, which also utilizes structure-from-motion in deep learning. With real face images in training, this network not only reconstructs 3D faces more accurately than prior art but also has better generalization ability in real-life testing cases.
ABSTRACT: The face is the most informative feature of humans and has been a long-standing research topic in Computer Vision and Graphics. Images of faces are also ubiquitous in photography and social media, and people have devoted significant resources to capturing and editing face images. Face editing can be broadly viewed as the encoding, manipulation and the decoding of some representations for face images. The challenges are that we want to manipulate an image in a controllable way and generate results that are both desirable and as realistic as possible. This thesis explores different Machine Learning-based face-editing approaches. I discuss the role of machine learning for achieving desirable edits by learning both the physical aspects as well as the statistical manifold of human faces. In my work for eye-editing, I discuss the importance of understanding multiple physical elements of a face image, such as shape, illumination, pose, etc. In a deep-learning-based approach, I introduce image formation domain knowledge to the construction and training of a neural network. This network provides transparent access to the disentangled representations of the aforementioned physical properties. With this network, we can achieve various face editing tasks in forms of representation manipulation. After that, I introduce Deforming Autoencoders, a network that learns to disentangle shape and appearance in an unsupervised manner. This disentanglement is beneficial for the learning of some other factors of variations, such as illumination and facial expression. In an extension of Deforming Autoencoders, we incorporate non-rigid structure-from-motion to learn a 3D morphable model for faces that only requires an image set for training. At last, I describe an image-to-image network for 3D face reconstruction, which also utilizes structure-from-motion in deep learning. With real face images in training, this network not only reconstructs 3D faces more accurately than prior art but also has better generalization ability in real-life testing cases.
Description:
As artificial intelligence and data science reshape the global information landscape, libraries are emerging as key players in both technological innovation and ethical stewardship. This international Zoom discussion brings together library professionals and educators from the U.S., Philippines, and Hong Kong to explore how institutions are integrating AI and data into their pedagogy and services.
Panelists will share concrete examples from their own libraries--ranging from data literacy initiatives to increasing discoverability. The conversation will also examine regional trends in librarianship, spotlighting how institutions in Asia are navigating the evolving role of data and AI.
Join us for a global conversation that highlights the transformative potential of libraries as hubs for innovation and critical inquiry in the age of AI.
Register for this free Zoom panel.
Panelists:
Ahmad Pratama is a Faculty Member and Associate Librarian at Stony Brook University Libraries, where he is working to build a comprehensive, campus-wide data literacy program within the Libraries. As the Data Literacies Lead, his work focuses on empowering students, faculty, and staff to critically and ethically engage with data and AI, including the development of a credit-bearing course in Critical Data & AI Literacies supported by an EDGE Fund Award from the Provost's Office. Previously, Dr. Pratama served as an Associate Professor of Information Technology, and his research and teaching explore the intersections of technology, policy, and society with a focus on data, AI, and innovation in higher education.
Dan Anthony Dorado is a full-time faculty member at the U.P. School of Library and Information Studies, where he teaches information technology, management and marketing, research methodology, and quantitative research. He was also the director of the Diliman Learning Resource Center under the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs. Before that, he was an Information Specialist at the College of Engineering Library, in charge of the System and Network Administration and The Learning Commons. He completed his master's degree at the Technology Management Center in U.P. Diliman and is currently pursuing his PhD in Data Science. As a member of Sync.Bio.Optics laboratory and the Publics, Archives, and Data (PANDA) Lab, his research specialization covers Computational Methods, Open Education, Critical Data Studies, and Radical Statistics.
Ryun LEE is Associate University Librarian at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library, leading Digital Initiatives and Library IT and Systems. He drives digital innovation through emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence to enhance services, streamline operations, and support CUHK's mission in research, education, and knowledge advancement. With a background in cataloging and digital repository development, Ryun leads projects in digitization, OCR, data visualization, text and network analysis, GIS, and digital scholarship. He actively promotes knowledge graph applications in Hong Kong studies and oversees efforts to digitize and preserve resources related to Hong Kong and Southern China. His recent work focuses on creating seamless digital experiences and developing data-driven infrastructure. He is currently exploring AI-driven approaches to digitization workflows and entity extraction, aiming to improve access, discovery, and long-term preservation of library materials.
Abstract: This dissertation addresses the methodological disconnect between Natural Language Processing (NLP) and human-centric analysis by shifting the unit of analysis from document to human behavior in two broad respects: (i) time-ordering: modeling documents as sequential person-indexed behavioral observations, and (ii) person-level semantics: evaluation and explainability of models by their latent structure of psychological constructs rather than just its predictive accuracy against narrow proxy measures. First, we consider the most basic implication of language as a person's behaviors when measuring their psychological constructs: relationship between language sample size and model's predictive performance. We empirically show that the state-of-the-art transformers are often over-parameterized for typical NLP dataset sizes and can be reduced in dimensionality without performance loss. Establishing the author as the unit of analysis naturally allows us to treat their behavior as a time-ordered sequence. Second, we introduce a longitudinal evaluation framework that establishes ecologically valid evaluation settings, namely, cross-sectional and prospective generalization, and separates error measurement of the model into within-person dynamics and between-person differences. We demonstrate that traditional NLP evaluations based on random document splits can yield reversed conclusions under ecologically valid generalization settings. To address this, we develop models that capture the trajectory of mental states (e.g., mood shifts) rather than static traits. Third, moving into person-level semantics, we evaluate the latent structure of large language models using a novel machine behavior analytic framework. We find that while GPT-4 achieves high predictive correlation with self-reports, its latent symptoms structure diverges from clinical understanding. Finally, we propose a method for modeling multidimensional behaviors, embedding concurrent behavioral signals alongside language to predict future states. Taken together, this work suggests that operationalizing language as behavior advances NLP methods into a rigorous instrument for valid psychological inquiry.
Speaker: Adithya Ganesan
Location: Join Zoom Meeting (ID: 99021939129, Passcode: 569493)
Speaker: Adithya Ganesan
Location: Join Zoom Meeting (ID: 99021939129, Passcode: 569493)
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 Ph.D. 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. Registered students must attend in person. Up to 3 absences will be excused. Everyone else is welcome to attend.
The seminar will be taught by Prof. Chao Chen, chao.chen.1@stonybrook.edu.
CSE 600 Talk: Squeezing Software Performance via Eliminating Wasteful Operations presented by Xu Liu
ABSTRACT: Inefficiencies abound in complex, layered software. A variety of inefficiencies show up as wasteful memory operations, such as redundant or useless memory loads and stores. Aliasing, limited optimization scopes, and insensitivity to input and execution contexts act as severe deterrents to static program analysis. Microscopic observation of whole executions at instruction- and operand-level granularity breaks down abstractions and helps recognize redundancies that masquerade in complex programs. In this talk, I will describe various wasteful memory operations, which pervasively exist in modern
software packages and expose great potential for optimization. I will discuss the design of a fine-grained instrumentation-based profiling framework that identifies wasteful operations in their contexts, which guides nontrivial performance improvement. Furthermore, I will show our recent improvement to the profiling framework by abandoning
instrumentation, which reduces the runtime overhead from 10x to 3% on average. I will show how our approach works for native binaries and various managed languages such as Java, yielding new performance insights for optimization.
BIO: Xu Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at College of William & Mary. He obtained his PhD from Rice University in 2014 and joined the College of William & Mary in the same year. Prof. Liu works on building performance tools to pinpoint and optimize inefficiencies in HPC code bases. He has developed several open-source profiling tools, which are used worldwide at universities, DOE national laboratories and industrial companies. Prof. Liu has published a number of papers in high-quality venues. His papers received Best Paper Award at SC'15, PPoPP'18, PPoPP'19 and ASPLOS'17 Highlights, as well as Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE'19. His recent ASPLOS'18 paper has been selected as ACM SIGPLAN Research Highlights in 2019 and nominated for CACM Research Highlights. Prof. Liu is the receipt of 2019 IEEE TCHPC Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing. Prof. Liu served on the program committee of conferences such as SC, PPoPP, IPDPS, CGO, HPCA and ASPLOS.
ABSTRACT: Inefficiencies abound in complex, layered software. A variety of inefficiencies show up as wasteful memory operations, such as redundant or useless memory loads and stores. Aliasing, limited optimization scopes, and insensitivity to input and execution contexts act as severe deterrents to static program analysis. Microscopic observation of whole executions at instruction- and operand-level granularity breaks down abstractions and helps recognize redundancies that masquerade in complex programs. In this talk, I will describe various wasteful memory operations, which pervasively exist in modern
software packages and expose great potential for optimization. I will discuss the design of a fine-grained instrumentation-based profiling framework that identifies wasteful operations in their contexts, which guides nontrivial performance improvement. Furthermore, I will show our recent improvement to the profiling framework by abandoning
instrumentation, which reduces the runtime overhead from 10x to 3% on average. I will show how our approach works for native binaries and various managed languages such as Java, yielding new performance insights for optimization.
BIO: Xu Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at College of William & Mary. He obtained his PhD from Rice University in 2014 and joined the College of William & Mary in the same year. Prof. Liu works on building performance tools to pinpoint and optimize inefficiencies in HPC code bases. He has developed several open-source profiling tools, which are used worldwide at universities, DOE national laboratories and industrial companies. Prof. Liu has published a number of papers in high-quality venues. His papers received Best Paper Award at SC'15, PPoPP'18, PPoPP'19 and ASPLOS'17 Highlights, as well as Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE'19. His recent ASPLOS'18 paper has been selected as ACM SIGPLAN Research Highlights in 2019 and nominated for CACM Research Highlights. Prof. Liu is the receipt of 2019 IEEE TCHPC Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing. Prof. Liu served on the program committee of conferences such as SC, PPoPP, IPDPS, CGO, HPCA and ASPLOS.
AI Seminar: Computational Pathology: Deep Learning, Classification and
Predicting the Future - Joel Saltz
Abstract: Pathologists have been looking at tissue through microscopes since the 1800s. During each pathologist's career, he or she views slides having roughly 1,000,000,000,000 cells. Deep learning methods are rapidly being developed to assimilate the huge amount of information walked inside of tissue images and to use this information to predict outcomes and responses to treatments.
Stony Brook is a leader in this type of multi-disciplinary work. I will provide an overview of Stony Brook computational Pathology efforts and articulate how these have the potential to create biomedical advances as well as to drive development of new computer science.
Bio: Dr. Joel Saltz is a leader in research on advanced information technologies for large scale data science and biomedical/scientific research. He has developed innovative pathology informatics methods, including: the first published whole slide virtual microscope system; pioneering pathology computer-aided diagnosis techniques; and methods for decomposing pathology images into features and linking those features to cancer omics, response to treatment and outcome. He has broken new ground in big data through development of the filter-stream based DataCutter system, the map-reduce style Active Data Repository and the inspector-executor runtime compiler framework. He has also been an active contributor in clinical informatics, having developed
predictive models for hospital readmissions, point of care laboratory testing quality assurance systems, decision support systems for electrophoresis interpretation and graphical user interfaces to support clinical data warehouse queries. Dr. Saltz has been a pioneer in establishing the field of biomedical informatics; he founded and built two highly successful departments of biomedical informatics, one at Ohio State University and one at Emory University. In 2013, he came to Stony Brook as Vice President for Clinical Informatics and Founding Department Chair of Biomedical Informatics - to create a living laboratory for biomedical informatics and to create a third unique biomedical informatics department dually housed in the School of Medicine and the College of Engineering. Dr. Saltz is trained both as a computer scientist and as a physician through the MSTP program at Duke University. He has deep experience in computer science, having served on the computer science faculties at Yale University and the University of Maryland. He completed his residency in clinical
pathology at Johns Hopkins University and he is a practicing, board-certified clinical pathologist.
Predicting the Future - Joel Saltz
Abstract: Pathologists have been looking at tissue through microscopes since the 1800s. During each pathologist's career, he or she views slides having roughly 1,000,000,000,000 cells. Deep learning methods are rapidly being developed to assimilate the huge amount of information walked inside of tissue images and to use this information to predict outcomes and responses to treatments.
Stony Brook is a leader in this type of multi-disciplinary work. I will provide an overview of Stony Brook computational Pathology efforts and articulate how these have the potential to create biomedical advances as well as to drive development of new computer science.
Bio: Dr. Joel Saltz is a leader in research on advanced information technologies for large scale data science and biomedical/scientific research. He has developed innovative pathology informatics methods, including: the first published whole slide virtual microscope system; pioneering pathology computer-aided diagnosis techniques; and methods for decomposing pathology images into features and linking those features to cancer omics, response to treatment and outcome. He has broken new ground in big data through development of the filter-stream based DataCutter system, the map-reduce style Active Data Repository and the inspector-executor runtime compiler framework. He has also been an active contributor in clinical informatics, having developed
predictive models for hospital readmissions, point of care laboratory testing quality assurance systems, decision support systems for electrophoresis interpretation and graphical user interfaces to support clinical data warehouse queries. Dr. Saltz has been a pioneer in establishing the field of biomedical informatics; he founded and built two highly successful departments of biomedical informatics, one at Ohio State University and one at Emory University. In 2013, he came to Stony Brook as Vice President for Clinical Informatics and Founding Department Chair of Biomedical Informatics - to create a living laboratory for biomedical informatics and to create a third unique biomedical informatics department dually housed in the School of Medicine and the College of Engineering. Dr. Saltz is trained both as a computer scientist and as a physician through the MSTP program at Duke University. He has deep experience in computer science, having served on the computer science faculties at Yale University and the University of Maryland. He completed his residency in clinical
pathology at Johns Hopkins University and he is a practicing, board-certified clinical pathologist.