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?

Dates/Times:

  • Tuesday, 2/3 at 2pm

  • Friday, 2/6 at 9:30am

Please register in advance for the Zoom link.

Can't Make It? Share Your Feedback!

We understand schedules are tight. If you cannot attend the live discussion, you can still share your thoughts! Join our AI Zoom Room to share your thoughts via video recording or email rose.tirotta-esposito@stonybrook.edu with your comments and ideas.

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)

University Libraries Presents:
Join librarian Christine Fena for an interactive workshop that invites you to explore AI tools first hand, not just as users, but as critical investigators.
Through playful experimentation and collaborative discovery, you'll uncover inherent biases, probe algorithmic flaws, and gain a deeper understanding of AI's limitations and societal impacts.

RSVP on SBEngaged

Location: Melville Library, Central Reading Room, Lab B
AI is everywhere and so are the privacy concerns that come with it. At its core, the most common forms of AI we use today are online digital services and thus inherit the usual privacy risks. We'll take a look at indirect prompt injection- a technique that can trick AI tools into revealing or extracting private information as well as techniques being used in academic contexts to manipulate systems and even mislead researchers.

Register here for the online session.
We live in a new scientific paradigm: the Big Data era, in which a lot of data is available for almost anything. In this new paradigm, the driving force is to use data directly to learn about chemical and physics systems employing artificial intelligence. This paradigm has proven helpful in simulating realistic physical, biological, and chemical models, yielding impressive results. Similarly, the insight gained in these situations can be used to improve our understanding of fundamental processes. In that regard, we want to answer the question: Can a machine learn chemistry? The answer to this question is still debatable, but we will show our ideas and methods to find the answer. We will also discuss our results on predicting atom-diatom reactions and other avenues and work in progress in our group.

Please register for the STEM Speaker Series: Can a Machine learn Chemistry here.
Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss what a CS PhD entails and the traits and habits that are important for success in PhD programs and future careers. While the talk is targeted to first-year PhD students, PhD students at all levels should derive from it.

Bio: Samir Das is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook
University. He is currently serving as the department chair. He is well recognized in the
community for his research in wireless networks and systems.

Location: NCS120

Join librarian Christine Fena for an interactive workshop that invites you to explore AI tools firsthand, not just as users, but as critical investigators. Through playful experimentation and collaborative discovery, you'll uncover inherent biases, probe algorithmic flaws, and gain a deeper understanding of AI's limitations and societal impacts.

Register to attend the online event.

You are cordially invited to attend the biweekly Brookhaven AI Mixer (BAM). BAM includes three short talks on AI research happening at BNL, followed by an open mixer over coffee and snacks for everyone to network and discuss all things AI. The first half hour will consist of presentations that will be available via ZOOM, and the second half hour will be for in person only networking.

Join us every other Tuesday at noon in CDSD's Training Room (building 725, 2nd floor) to learn about interesting AI methods and applications, engage with potential collaborators, prepare for pending FASST funding calls, and build a community of AI for Science at BNL.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025, 12:00 pm -- CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room


Speakers

Sanket Jantre
Tao Zhang
Xi Yu


Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1615289117?pwd=Hqkbj9itxWrFnkhZ8rQXHPInO2gxdF.1

Meeting ID: 161 528 9117
Passcode: 991382

Title: Sustainable NLP

Time: Friday 4/29, 2:40 PM

Location: NCS 120

Abstract:


Natural language processing (NLP) technology has supercharged many real-world applications ranging from intelligent personal assistants (like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant) to commercial search engines such as Google and Bing. But current NLP applications use extremely large neural models, making them (i) expensive to deploy on servers, requiring large amounts of compute resources and power, and (ii) impossible to run on mobile devices, making on-device, privacy-preserving applications impractical.

In the first part of the talk, I will describe systems optimizations we have developed that significantly reduce the compute and memory requirement of NLP models. The optimizations we developed can be applied broadly and results in over 10x reduction in latency when deployed on mobile devices. In the second part of the talk, I will describe our recent work on predicting energy consumption of NLP models. Existing energy prediction approaches are not accurate, making it difficult for developers and practitioners to reason about their models in terms of power. We use a multi-level regression approach that produces highly accurate and interpretable energy predictions.



Bio:
Aruna Balasubramanian is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. She received her Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her dissertation won the UMass outstanding dissertation award and was the SIGCOMM dissertation award runner up. She works in the area of networked systems. Her current work consists of two threads: (1) significantly improving Quality of Experience of Internet applications, and (2) improving the usability, accessibility, and privacy of mobile systems. She is the recipient of the SIGMobile Rockstar award, a Ubicomp best paper award, a Computing Innovation Fellowship, a VMWare Early Career award, several Google research awards, an

Abstract:

Many real world complex problems are multi-step reasoning tasks. These range from analytic tasks such as answering questions to automation tasks where agents complete tasks on behalf of users.. Evaluation, datasets, and models for such tasks can be unreliable for multiple reasons. (i) Datasets often have annotation artifacts and biases, allowing models to take reasoning shortcuts. Such shortcuts can allow models to make effective guesses -- or, in a sense, cheat -- to achieve high performance without any multi-step reasoning. This issue is further exacerbated for complex tasks because as the number of the required reasoning steps increases, so do the avenues for bypassing those steps. (ii) Models trained on such dataset/s learn to solve the task by taking reasoning shortcuts instead of proper multi-step reasoning. As a result, these models are not robust (reliable) when evaluated in an out-of-distribution evaluation setting. (iii) Lastly, recent works have shown that language models can solve complex multi-step tasks by producing a step-by-step explanation without any training. However, these methods often hallucinate factually incorrect (i.e., unreliable) explanations when posed with knowledge-intensive tasks.

I address these challenges by carefully characterizing the requirements of robust multi-step reasoning and designing reliable evaluation datasets and training methods that necessitate thorough multi-step reasoning. In DiRe, I first formalize and introduce Disconnected Reasoning, i.e., reasoning that allows models to arrive at the correct answer by bypassing necessary reasoning steps, and use this formalization to measure how much multi-step reasoning a model does on a dataset. In MuSiQue, I built a multi-step reasoning dataset for QA from scratch that avoids cheatability via disconnected reasoning, providing a more reliable evaluation. In TeaBReaC, I developed a synthetically generated multi-step QA pretraining dataset designed to force models to avoid disconnected reasoning and learn reliable multi-step reasoning. In IRCoT, I address the reliability of model-generated multi-step reasoning chains by interleaving models' step-by-step reasoning with a step-by-step retrieval from an external corpus, resulting in more factually correct reasoning. Finally, in AppWorld, I built a multi-step reasoning dataset that requires highly interactive problem-solving in an environment carefully designed to ensure models need thorough reasoning to succeed.
Speaker: Harsh Trivedi

Location: NCS 220 or Zoom

https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/99096379762?pwd=zYCJZQVxRuZd9BboscO4nlodCwsKBr.1



Abstract: Trustworthy AI deployment in high-stakes domains requires systems that are fair, private, robust, and controllable as they scale. Yet these demands are often pursued through ad-hoc approaches, lacking a systematic understanding of the inherent trade-offs between competing objectives. We add fairness regularizers and hope bias decreases. We train on massive datasets and hope the model learns the underlying logic of how concepts combine, rather than memorizing statistical shortcuts. We encrypt data and hope the resulting computational overhead remains manageable. But hope isnot a science.
In this talk, I argue that what trustworthy AI lacks is not better heuristics but a deeper science of what these properties fundamentally cost and what is achievable. Before we can fix a system, we must map the terrain: what trade-offs are unavoidable, what regions of performance areunreachable, and how far current methods fall from what is actually achievable. My research builds this map across fairness, privacy, robustness, and controllability, following a common methodology: diagnose where models fail, characterize the fundamental limits any method must obey, and design systems that approach those limits. I will present this framework, its extension to scientific applications where we replace statistical constraints with physical laws to ensure AI systems remain grounded in reality, and a vision for scaling these principles to the rapidly expanding ecosystem of composed and interacting AI systems.


Bio: Dr. Vishnu Boddeti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, where he leads the Human Analysis Lab (HAL). His research develops mathematical frameworks for trustworthy AI, spanning fairness, privacy, robustness, and physics-informed learning, with an emphasis on characterizing fundamental limits and building systems that achieve them. His work has been supported by NSF, NIST, DARPA, ONR, Ford, and others, and recognized with a Meta Research Award (2021). His research has been featured on the cover of Nature, recognized as an Editor's Highlight in Nature Communications, and received multiple best paper awards, including the 2024 IEEE-CCF Cloud Computing Best Paper Award and the TMLR Outstanding Certification Finalist (2023). He serves as Senior Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security and completed his PhD in ECE from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012.

Location: NCS 120