This workshop is intended for researchers, practitioners, students, and industry professionals in AI, robotics, machine learning, human-robot interaction, and related fields.

Workshop Overview:

Instead of learning from data alone, an embodied AI system learns through its movements, sensors, and interactions with the environment. This form of active, experience-based learning, informed by ongoing self-evaluation of its own abilities, enables embodied AI systems to adapt on the fly, understand context rather than just commands, and collaborate with humans in more natural and trustworthy ways.

Workshop Goals:

  1. Foster interdisciplinary dialogue across AI, robotics, and cognitive science.
  2. Identify key challenges and future research directions in embodied intelligence.
  3. Examine the role of embodiment in advancing toward AGI.

This workshop is Invitation-only. Please email Dr. IV Ramakrishnan (ram@cs.stonybrook.edu) to attend.

Read the announcement: https://mcusercontent.com/237207911c0fd4c1f78dd8524/files/070dec2e-a2f5-143e-0fe2-c4ebecdb5193/Embodied_AI_Workshop_Invitation_.pdf

The Hudson River Estuary (HRE) and New York Bight (NYB) are closely connected, with HRE acting as crucial areas where many NYB marine species spawn and grow. Understanding how these biotic and abiotic environments interact, especially with rapid climate change, is key to better managing fisheries and conserving ecosystems. To better understand the HRE-NYB ecosystem, we develop a comprehensive ecosystem model that links physical and biological processes. Using data from long-term monitoring programs, we analyze ecological patterns and identify key factors regulating the ecosystem. We use this information to develop a model that mimics the food web from tiny plankton to large predators in the ecosystem. This model can help us better understand how changes in the environment, like rising temperatures, and human activities such as fishing affect marine lives and ecosystem over time. The insights from this model can support smarter fisheries management and efforts to conserve marine ecosystems in the HRE-NYB region.

IACS Student Seminar Speaker: Xiangyan Yang, Dept. of Applied Math & Statistics

Location: IACS Seminar Room or Zoom

Join Zoom Meeting: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/91650247483?pwd=fvAGEwadplJh7jFC5RWcdvZ5NWPJth.1
Meeting ID: 916 5024 7483
Passcode: 631055
The Stony Brook Computing Society presents an exciting event featuring experts from Google (Danny Rosen - Technical Program Manager) and NVIDIA (Veer Mehta - Senior Solutions Architect), diving into the latest developments in generative AI. Learn how these industry leaders are shaping the future of technology and explore new ideas in a relaxed, engaging setting.

📍 Location: Frey 102
📅 Date: Monday, Nov 11
⏰ Time: 12 PM - 1:50 PM

Scan the QR code or register in the link.

https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/94414957054?pwd=V1JMc2EwSnVGMFdaUlNobE9DSHU4dz09#success
ID: 94414957054
Password: 094758

Speaker: Heather J. Lynch


Bio:  Dr. Heather J. Lynch is an Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University. Prior to Stony Brook, Dr. Lynch was an Adjunct Professor of Applied Math and Statistics at UC Santa Cruz and a Research Scientist in the Biology Department at the University Maryland. Dr. Lynch received her A.B. in Physics from Princeton University in 2000, an A.M. in Physics from Harvard University in 2004, and a Ph.D. in Organismal and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2006. Dr. Lynch's research is focused on spatial population dynamics of Antarctic penguins, with a particular focus on statistical and mathematical models to integrate patchy time series with remote sensing imagery. These data will allow Dr. Lynch and colleagues to develop mathematical models to explore how coloniality constrains the colonization and extinction of individual habitat patches and, ultimately, the metapopulation dynamics of colonial seabirds.   
I will be holding an informal 2-week short optimization course, to try
to cover a few important proofs in the field. The goal will be depth
over breadth, with focus on:

 - convergence proofs for gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent
 - energy functions and continuous time optimization
 - estimate sequences and Nesterov acceleration

and, time permitting, additional topics like variance reduction,
quasi-Newton methods, and Frank-Wolfe methods. If we go super fast, we
can spend a few days at the end brainstorming interesting research
project ideas.

Details: NCS 220 6:15pm-7:45pm, Monday-Friday, Feb 7-Feb 18.

In person only, since I plan to use the whiteboard (but may be recorded)

More details will be uploaded here (notes, specific schedule):
https://sites.google.com/view/optimization-short-course/home

The Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

For more information and registration, please visit the official website.

Abstract: DeepSeek-R1-Zero has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) at scale can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs without supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we critically examine R1-Zero-like training by analyzing its two core components: base models and RL. We investigate a wide range of base models, including DeepSeek-V3-Base, to understand how pretraining characteristics influence RL performance. Our analysis reveals that DeepSeek-V3-Base already exhibit ''Aha moment'', while Qwen2.5 base models demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities even without prompt templates, suggesting potential pretraining biases. Additionally, we identify an optimization bias in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which artificially increases response length (especially for incorrect outputs) during training. To address this, we introduce Dr. GRPO, an unbiased optimization method that improves token efficiency while maintaining reasoning performance. Leveraging these insights, we present a minimalist R1-Zero recipe that achieves 43.3% accuracy on AIME 2024 with a 7B base model, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

Speaker: Md. Saqib Hasan

Location: CS2311
Mind Brain Lecture: Constructing the World of Taste in Your Head You fork the morsel into your mouth and say yum...chocolate cake. The appreciation of your dessert's taste seems to follow directly, quickly and simply from the placement of the food on your tongue. The truth, however, is far more interesting and complex: your brain actually begins determining whether you will enjoy a bite of food even before the fork approaches your mouth and continues to work the problem well after. Information about your food's color, smell, texture and taste activates multiple parts of your brain, where that information collides with your pre-mouthful beliefs about how it should taste. The coming-together and shuffling of that information around the brain takes time, as networks of neurons work together to help you decide whether the morsel in your mouth is worth swallowing. Referring to work from psychology, biology and computational neuroscience, Professor Katz will de-mystify and reveal the beauty of these complexities of the neuroscience of taste. Donald Katz, Professor of Psychology, Departments of Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University Free presentation intended for a general audience. Reception to follow. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/mind/