This is Stony Brook's quantum moment. Join us for a spotlight on the core achievements and research excellence of faculty across the Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CAS), and Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) - and their collaborative advancements in quantum science and technology. Learn about the real world impact of their enduring work, their leadership in translating foundational science into entrepreneurial opportunities, and their impetus for making connections to next generation innovation.

Presented by: Catherine Chen, Ph.D., Research Development Associate

Welcome remarks: President Andrea Goldsmith

Panel moderators: Dean David Wrobel, CAS, and Dean Andrew Singer, CEAS

Presentations and panel featuring our faculty:

  • Jennifer Cano, CAS, Physics and Astronomy

  • P. Scott Carney, CEAS, Mechanical Engineering

  • Hyeongrak Chuck Choi, CEAS, Electrical and Computer Engineering

  • Eden Figueroa, CAS, Physics and Astronomy

  • Humanshu Gupta, CEAS, Computer Science

  • Angela Kelly, CAS, Physics and Astronomy

Location: Theatre at the Charles B. Wang Center, Stony Brook University

Reserve your tickets by March 26!

Topic: AI Seminar: Owen Rambow
Time: Mar 17, 2021 10:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting

https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/93614644178?pwd=MzJtVDJYYmU5T1dtMzJiUFMxb0x4dz09
Meeting ID: 936 1464 4178.    Passcode: 965936






Natural Language Understanding and Semantic Parsing

(Partly joint work with former colleagues at Elemental Cognition)

Semantic parsing refers to the task of determining the propositional content of language: who did what to whom.  It is part of the larger task of natural language understanding (NLU).  I will start out by discussing what full NLU means, and argue that we are still far away, as a field, from solving full NLU, or even from knowing how to evaluate it.

In the second part of the talk, I will situate semantic parsing in the context of several other NLU subtasks.  Typically, the target representation of semantic parsing uses an ontology (such as PropBank or FrameNet).  Semantic parsing includes the subtasks of word sense disambiguation, argument detection, and argument role labeling.  I will discuss choices among possible target ontologies.  I will justify why we created a new ontology, Hector, based on FrameNet and the lexical resource NOAD, and explain some of its characteristics.

In the third part of the talk, I will present experiments we performed using transformer models.  We obtain best results using a two-phase model, in which we first choose the frame, and then, given the frame, choose the arguments.  We encode the problem for both tasks using indices in the sentence.  While we develop the parser for our new ontology Hector, this approach also beats the state of the art for FrameNet and PropBank parsing.Biography:  I am a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University with a joint appointment in IACS.

Until recently, I was a research scientist at Elemental Cognition. Elemental Cognition is working on deep natural language understanding.

I got my PhD with Aravind Joshi at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. I have worked at CoGenTex, and at AT&T Labs -- Research, and for many years I was a research scientist at Columbia University in the Center for Computational Learning Systems.

The Department of AI and Society (AIS) at the University at Buffalo is hosting a two-day AI and Society Workshop focused on building AI systems by society, for society. This workshop brings together researchers and community organizers to explore how AI systems can be developed through meaningful collaboration across disciplines.

Topics include:

  • Labor and AI
  • Public services and AI
  • Community-centered AI systems
  • Intersections of humanities, social sciences, arts, and computing

The vision of UB's Department of AI and Society is to create a future where AI systems are built by society, for society. AIS centers community engagement at every stage of AI development through collaboration across disciplines and sectors. AIS was established with a $5 million grant from SUNY, and this workshop is made possible through that support.

Who Should Attend?

  • Researchers
  • Students
  • Community organizers
  • Practitioners interested in AI's societal impact

More about the event

Register here

Join us as we celebrate this year's Brook & Beyond Challenge finalists.
The Office for Research and Innovation invites you to hear about the two-month journey in which the Brook & Beyond team supported eight cohorts in bringing their bold ideas from the lab to the marketplace. It's an energizing evening that highlights the collaboration, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit driving discovery across the University.
Meet this year's award recipients, hear pitches from the emerging founders, and applaud their achievements.
Connect, celebrate, and be part of the momentum shaping the future of innovation at
Stony Brook University.
Refreshments will be served. Registration is required.
Register Here.

Abstract: The landscape of machine learning evolves rapidly and the complexity of the networks and their architectures defies easy comprehension. AI is touted as the next scientific revolution by allowing the processing and pattern-finding in increasingly massive data sets. One potential end results could be AI enhanced measurement technologies, but what does that mean? This talk will give examples of how classical tools indicate the technical obstacles to this vision in terms of understanding training processes, model comparisons, and feature embeddings. While the results in this talk are largely empirical, they point to interesting directions for (infomation?) theoretical investigation.

Bio: Anand D. Sarwate is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He received B.S. degrees in math and electrical engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Rutgers he was a Research Assistant Professor at TTI-Chicago and a postdoc at the ITA Center at UC San Diego. His research interests include information theory, machine learning, signal processing, optimization, and privacy and security.
Location: Light Engineering 250
The Art Department is hosting a guest artist exhibition, featuring the work of Young Maeng. The Opening Reception will be held on October 10th at 5 PM. Additionally, Young Maeng will be giving a talk on 'AI and Painting' on Oct 9 at 4:30 PM at the Future Histories Studio. Exhibition Location: Gallery Unbound, 3rd Floor, Staller Center, Stony Brook University
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