The Thirty-Ninth annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference will be held from Dec 2nd to Dec 7th, 2025 at the San Diego Convention Center. More information can be found here.
The International Neuroethics Society (INS) Speaker Series on AI & Consciousness
Abstract: Colln Allen and I noted in our 2008 book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong, that consciousness, a theory of mind, sociability, situational awareness and embodiment are all supra-rational (beyond reason) capabilities that contribute to making ethical decision Whether any of these can be fully instantiated in machines remains an open question. Nevertheless, moral decision making in the digital age will require an evolution in and refinement of specific skills for both humans and for AI. I call one of these evolutions in moral decision making capabilities tradeoff ethics and another a silent ethics. Aspects of this social, and not just technological evolution, will require research by neuroscientists.
Speaker Bio: Wendell Wallach has an international reputation as an expert on the ethics and governance of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. He is also senior advisor to The Hastings Center and a scholar at the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics where he chaired Technology and Ethics studies for eleven years. Wallach's latest book, a primer on emerging technologies, is entitled, A Dangerous Master: How to keep technology from slipping beyond our control. He co-authored (with Colin Allen) Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong. Wallach has been referred to as, a Godfather of AI Ethics.
Pre-register here (required): https://umaryland.zoom.us/
Abstract: Colln Allen and I noted in our 2008 book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong, that consciousness, a theory of mind, sociability, situational awareness and embodiment are all supra-rational (beyond reason) capabilities that contribute to making ethical decision Whether any of these can be fully instantiated in machines remains an open question. Nevertheless, moral decision making in the digital age will require an evolution in and refinement of specific skills for both humans and for AI. I call one of these evolutions in moral decision making capabilities tradeoff ethics and another a silent ethics. Aspects of this social, and not just technological evolution, will require research by neuroscientists.
Speaker Bio: Wendell Wallach has an international reputation as an expert on the ethics and governance of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. He is also senior advisor to The Hastings Center and a scholar at the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics where he chaired Technology and Ethics studies for eleven years. Wallach's latest book, a primer on emerging technologies, is entitled, A Dangerous Master: How to keep technology from slipping beyond our control. He co-authored (with Colin Allen) Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong. Wallach has been referred to as, a Godfather of AI Ethics.
Pre-register here (required): https://umaryland.zoom.us/
Abstract: Pretraining vision encoders with self-supervision (SSL) leads to stronger representations that excel across diverse downstream tasks. One of the key factors enabling self-supervision is extracting multiple views of the same scene to formulate either: 1) View-invariant pretraining (DINO, SimCLR, iBOT), where the objective is predicting the same representation for different views of the scene; or 2) Cross-view pretraining (cross-view Masked Autoencoders), where the objective is predicting missing parts of one view using other views. For extracting multiple views, view-invariant methods rely on a combination of handcrafted augmentations (random cropping, color jittering, gaussian blur, etc.) of the same image, whereas cross-view pretraining methods rely on image cropping or video frames. In this work, we present methods to effectively incorporate synthetic views from diffusion models into SSL training.
For view-invariant pretraining, we introduce Gen-SIS, a method that leverages the ability of diffusion models to generate interpolated images through interpolation in conditioning space. We introduce a disentanglement pretext task: disentangling two source images from an interpolated synthetic image. This disentanglement task, in addition to vanilla single-source generative augmentation for view extraction, improves visual pretraining of various view-invariant methods (DINO, SimCLR, iBOT).
For cross-view pretraining, we introduce CDG-MAE, a novel cross-view masked autoencoder (MAE) based method that uses diverse synthetic views generated from static images via an image-conditioned diffusion model to learn dense correspondences. We present a quantitative method to evaluate the local and global consistency of the generated views to choose the right diffusion model for cross-view pretraining. These generated views exhibit substantial changes in pose and perspective, providing a rich training signal that overcomes the limitations of video (expensive) and crop-based (less variation) methods. CDG-MAE substantially narrows the gap to video-based MAE methods on video label propagation tasks while maintaining the data advantages of image-only MAEs.
Speaker: Varun Belagali
Location: NCS 120
Zoom: https://stonybrook.zoom.
The Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) will host the 16th International Conference on Emerging Technologies for a Smarter World (CEWIT2020) virtually on November 5, 2020. The conference will center on the four major fields which are penetrating our business and personal lives: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Computational Medicine. For more info visit: https://www.cewit.org/.
The Future of Learning: Rethinking Practice in a Changing World
Thursday, March 26, 2026 (Workshops)
Friday, March 27, 2026 (Symposium)
Open to Stony Brook University Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Students. Hosted by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Office of the Provost.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Workshop: AI Tools and Techniques
Friday, March 27, 2026
Keynote: Teaching and Thinking with AI
Keynote Speaker: José Antonio Bowen
José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Southampton (UK), as a dean at Miami University and SMU and as President of Goucher College. Bowen has worked as a musician with Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, and many others and his symphony was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (1985).
Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford and has written over 100 scholarly articles and books, including the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), Teaching Naked (2012 and the winner of the Ness Award for Best Book on Higher Education), Teaching Naked Techniques with C. Edward Watson (2017) and Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience and Reflection (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
Bowen has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and has three TED talks. Stanford honored him as a Distinguished Alumni Scholar (2010) and he has presented keynotes and workshops at more than 300 campuses and conferences 46 states and 17 countries around the world. In 2018, he was awarded the Ernest L. Boyer Award (for significant contributions to American higher education). He is a senior fellow for the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
Register here.
Thursday, March 26, 2026 (Workshops)
Friday, March 27, 2026 (Symposium)
Open to Stony Brook University Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Students. Hosted by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Office of the Provost.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Workshop: AI Tools and Techniques
- Open to all faculty & staff
- Hands-on, exploratory
- Registration only limited to the size of the room
- Location: In-person, TBD
- Time: 10 AM - 12 PM
- Registration required
Friday, March 27, 2026
Keynote: Teaching and Thinking with AI
- Faculty, TAs, postdocs, and academic staff
- In-person on-campus conference venue
- Location: SAC Balroom
- Time: 9 AM - 3 PM
- Registration required
Keynote Speaker: José Antonio Bowen
José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Southampton (UK), as a dean at Miami University and SMU and as President of Goucher College. Bowen has worked as a musician with Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, and many others and his symphony was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (1985).
Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford and has written over 100 scholarly articles and books, including the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), Teaching Naked (2012 and the winner of the Ness Award for Best Book on Higher Education), Teaching Naked Techniques with C. Edward Watson (2017) and Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience and Reflection (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
Bowen has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and has three TED talks. Stanford honored him as a Distinguished Alumni Scholar (2010) and he has presented keynotes and workshops at more than 300 campuses and conferences 46 states and 17 countries around the world. In 2018, he was awarded the Ernest L. Boyer Award (for significant contributions to American higher education). He is a senior fellow for the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
Register here.
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:
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!
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?
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)
The Tiger Team open house will be Monday, September 20 at high noon by Zoom:
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/