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/.  
18th Annual Engineering Ball Flowerfield, St. James, NY Thursday April, 2nd, 7:00 to 10:00 pm Pick up your tickets in 231 Engineering (Monday - Friday, 10:00 am to 4 pm) Presenting Partner: L3Harris
Looking to learn about a new topic or skill? Look no further! Gemini's Guided Learning feature acts as your own personal tutor, teaching you about a particular subject through an engaging back and forth conversation. This AI tool helps users develop their knowledge and skills on a wide variety of topics, acting as a patient mentor, breaking down complex topics step-by-step. This session will take place on 2/24 at 11 AM. Please register using the link below!
https://stonybrookuniversity.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a9PVlBw0E1Bal1A?
AI + Music Seminar - The meeting will consist of introductions and organizational discussions, aimed at understanding participants' interests. We'll discuss what the seminars can focus on going forward.
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 for the Zoom workshop here.
The Challenges of Machine Learning in Adversarial Settings by Patrick McDaniel, Pennsylvania State University

Abstract: Advances in AI and machine learning have enabled new applications and services to interpret and process inputs in previously unthinkable complex environments. Autonomous cars, data analytics, adaptive communication and self-aware software systems are now revolutionizing markets by achieving or exceeding human performance. In this talk, I consider the evolving use of machine learning in security-sensitive contexts and explore why many systems are vulnerable to nonobvious and potentially dangerous manipulation. Here, we examine sensitivity in any application whose misuse might lead to harm--for instance, forcing adaptive network in an unstable state, crashing an autonomous vehicle or bypassing an adult content filter. I explore the use of machine learning in this area particularly in light of recent discoveries in the creation of adversarial samples and defenses against them and posit on future attacks on machine learning. The talk is concluded with a discussion of the technological and societal challenges we face as a result of current and future advances in intelligent computing.

Bio: Patrick McDaniel is the William L. Weiss Professor of Information and Communications Technology and Director of the Institute for Networking and Security Research in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Professor McDaniel is also a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM and the director of the NSF Frontier Center for Trustworthy Machine Learning. He also served as the program manager and lead scientist for the Army Research Laboratory's Cyber-Security Collaborative Research Alliance from 2013 to 2018. Patrick's research centrally focuses on a wide range of topics in computer and network security and technical public policy. Prior to joining Penn State in 2004, he was a senior research staff member at AT&T Labs-Research.

Abstract: Computational pathology has revolutionized cancer diagnosis and research through the analysis of digitized whole slide images (WSIs). However, the giga-pixel size of these images presents profound technical challenges, creating two intertwined bottlenecks: computational inefficiency and label inefficiency. The immense data scale makes standard end-to-end (E2E) training of deep neural networks infeasible due to prohibitive GPU memory requirements, while the reliance on expert pathologists for annotations makes obtaining high-quality labeled data a tedious and expensive process. This proposal confronts these dual challenges by developing a series of novel model architectures, training paradigms, and self-supervised learning methods designed to create a more efficient and effective framework for WSI analysis.

To improve computational efficiency, this proposal first introduces a locally supervised learning paradigm that enables E2E training on entire WSIs by partitioning a network into gradient-isolated modules, circumventing the memory bottleneck of backpropagation. Second, it presents Prompt-MIL, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework that reduces the number of trainable parameters, memory consumption, and training time by fine-tuning only few prompts to guide large pre-trained models. Third, this work advances the efficient architecture on WSIs by developing novel State-Space Models (SSMs). It proposes 2DMamba, the first intrinsic Mamba architecture that preserves the crucial 2D spatial structure of images, overcoming the spatial discrepancy inherent in 1D models. Fourth, to address the inefficiency of multi-directional scans in Mamba models, including 2DMamba, it presents Locally Bi-directional Mamba (LBMamba), which introduces a novel, hardware-aware local backward scan that integrates bi-directional scan into a single forward pass, significantly improving throughput performance trade-off. Lastly, it proposes an extension to the LBMamba, warp-level Bi-directional Mamba (WLBMamba) that extends the thread-level bidirectional scan to warp-level bidirectional scan that further improves the throughput performance trade-off.

To improve label efficiency, this proposal proposes a Precise Location-based Matching strategy for self-supervised dense contrastive learning. By allowing a local patch in one augmented view to match multiple overlapping patches in another, creates a more accurate correspondence, leading to superior feature representations for dense prediction tasks like segmentation and detection.

In summary, this proposal presents a holistic investigation into the efficiency bottlenecks in computational pathology. Through these combined contributions in model architecture, training paradigms, and self-supervised learning, this work establishes a more scalable, efficient, and powerful computational framework for analyzing giga-pixel pathology images.

Speaker: Jingwei Zhang

Location: Old Computer Science Room 2114

Zoom: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/95187903649?pwd=tV0CNxLu1QKqw7hGmcE1h0rJ2C6n1b.1
Meeting ID: 951 8790 3649 | Passcode: 488916

George Em Karniadakis received his SM and PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was appointed lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 1987 and subsequently he joined the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford/Nasa Ames. He joined Princeton University as assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and as associate faculty in the program of applied and computational mathematics. He was a visiting professor at Caltech in 1993 in the Aeronautics Department and joined Brown University as associate professor of applied mathematics in the Center for Fluid Mechanics in 1994. After becoming a full professor in 1996, he continues to be a visiting professor and senior lecturer of Ocean/Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is an AAAS fellow (2018), fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2010), fellow of the American Physical Society (2004), fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2003) and associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2006). He received the Alexander von Humboldt award in 2017, the Ralf E Kleinman award (2015), the J. Tinsley Oden Medal (2013), and the CFD award (2007) from the US Association in Computational Mechanics. His h-index is 103, and he has been cited over 52,000 times.


Abstract:
Karniadakis will present a new approach to develop a data-driven, learning-based framework for predicting outcomes of physical and biological systems, governed by PDEs, and for discovering hidden physics from noisy data. He will introduce a deep learning approach based on neural networks (NNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs). He will also introduce new NNs that learn functionals and nonlinear operators from functions and corresponding responses for system identification. Unlike other approaches that rely on big data, here we learn from small data by exploiting the information provided by the physical conservation laws, which are used to obtain informative priors or regularize the neural networks. He will demonstrate the power of PINNs for several inverse problems in fluid mechanics, solid mechanics and biomedicine including wake flows, shock tube problems, material characterization, brain aneurysms, etc., where traditional methods fail due to lack of boundary and initial conditions or material properties. He will also present a new NN, DeepM&Mnet, which uses DeepOnets as building blocks for multiphysics problems, and he will demonstrate its unique capability in a 7-field hypersonics application.  

To register and for more information, click here 
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.
Virtual Talk: Contextual Modeling for Natural Language Understanding, Generation and Grounding by Rui Zhang

Zoom link to come.

Abstract: Natural language is a fundamental form of information and communication. In both human-human and human-computer communication, people reason about the context of text and world state to understand language and produce language response. In this talk, I present 
several deep-neural-network-based systems that first understand the meaning of language grounded in various contexts where the language is used, and then generate effective language responses in different forms for information access and human-computer communication. First, 
I will introduce Speaker Interaction RNNs for addressee and response selection in multi-party conversations based on explicit representations for different discourse participants. Then, I will 
present a text summarization approach for generating email subject lines by optimizing quality scores in a reinforcement learning framework. Finally, I will show an editing-based multi-turn SQL query generation system towards intelligent natural language interfaces to databases. 

Bio: Rui Zhang is a final-year PhD student at Yale University advised by Professor Dragomir Radev. His research interest lies in various natural language processing problems in understanding, generation, and grounding. He has been working on (1) End-to-End Neural Modeling for Entities, Sentences, Documents and Multi-party Multi-turn Dialogues, (2) Text Summarization for Emails, News and Scientific Articles, (3) Cross-lingual Information Retrieval for Low-Resource Languages, (4) Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing in Human-Computer Interaction. Rui Zhang has published papers and served as Program Committee members at top-tier NLP and AI conferences including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, AAAI and CoNLL. During his PhD, he has done research internships at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Grammarly Research and Google AI. He was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and got his Bachelor's degrees at both the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University from the UM-SJTU Joint Institute.