News

February 12, 2024

February 23 Colloquium: "Exploring Dual Perspectives in Computer-mediated Empathy"

 In this talk, I will focus on recent projects that explore how technologies can facilitate empathy. These approaches primarily focus on those who need to be empathized and help them express, reveal, and reflect on themselves. 

January 25, 2024

February 2 Colloquium: "AI for Public Sector Applications: Deployed Studies"

We will start with a 4-year collaboration with a crowdsourcing food rescue platform, where we combined offline ML model with online optimization to improve volunteer engagement. We will discuss our randomized controlled trial, and our experience rolling it out to over 25 cities across North America. 

November 2, 2023

December 1 Colloquium: "Towards bit-parallel database systems for analytic database applications"

In this talk, I'll present a new perspective on the data representation substrate for data platforms. I argue that a bit-level data shredding approach could offer significant advantages for future data platforms. 

October 26, 2023

SCI Faculty Member, Graduate Students Win Best Paper Award at ISMAR 2023

Dr. Jacob Biehl (Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship), Master’s Student Thomas Downes and PhD Student Talha Khan won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).

October 25, 2023

November 10 Colloquium: "Reconfiguring Participation: Reflections on Community-Based Technology Projects"

In technology design for social change, we must continually examine the questions of "What is the right thing to do?" and "How do we know we have done it?" I reflect on two projects situated in Nepal and the US that sought to support vulnerable populations through participatory technology design.

October 25, 2023

November 3 Colloquium: "Ten Years Retrospect of Backscatter Research"

In this talk, the speaker will share his experience on conducting experimental research. In particular, he will talk about three backscatter sensing and communication systems he built in the past ten years and share the lessons he learnt from building them, as well as discussing how he leverages these lessons to expand his research.

October 17, 2023

October 27 Colloquium: "eHealth CSI: A Wi-Fi Sensing Dataset of Human Activities"

In this talk, I will introduce the MídiaCom eHealth CSI dataset, which comprises diverse Wi-Fi CSI data from over 100 individuals engaged in different activities within a controlled environment. 

October 17, 2023

October 20 Colloquium: "Making SGD Parameter-Free"

We develop an algorithm for parameter-free stochastic convex optimization (SCO) whose rate of convergence is only a double-logarithmic factor larger than the optimal rate for the corresponding known-parameter setting. 

September 18, 2023

October 13 Colloquium: "Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality"

Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they signal more substantial limitations? 

September 15, 2023

September 29 Colloquium: "Hip and Knee Bony Anatomy Segmentation in Plain Radiographs: Lessons Learned from Building Fully-annotated Imaging Datasets to Unbiased Segmentation"

Through an extensive evaluation, this work offers insights into underlying causes of biases, presenting targeted mitigation strategies tailored to alleviate gender and racial biases, thereby engendering automatic segmentation results that are fair, impartial, and safe in the context of AI. 

September 13, 2023

CS Colloquium Series: Fall 2023 Dates

Join us this fall for our CS Colloquium Series. All talks will be held in the 5th-floor seminar room (5317) in Sennott Square, 2-3:15pm. Light refreshments will be provided. Keep an eye out for more information about the individual talks and speakers!

Xiang Lorraine Li
September 13, 2023

November 17 Colloquium: "Probabilistic (Commonsense) Knowledge in Language"

This talk will introduce a probabilistic model representing commonsense knowledge using a learned latent space of geometric embeddings -- probabilistic box embeddings. Using box embeddings makes it possible to handle commonsense queries with intersections, unions, and negations in a way similar to Venn diagram reasoning. Meanwhile, we show limitations with current Large Language models with their (commonsense) reasoning ability. 

July 27, 2023

CS Assistant Professor Xiaowei Jia awarded NSF CAREER Award for Machine Learning Research

How can new advances in machine learning impact real-world problems and discoveries?

Assistant Professor Xiaowei Jia’s research seeks to...

July 17, 2023

Professor Diane Litman Receives NSF Grant for Reflection-Informed STEM Learning and Instruction

Professor Diane Litman (Department of Computer Science) received a research grant from the National Science Foundation for her project “Developing and Optimizing Reflection-Informed STEM Learning...

May 30, 2023

CS PhD students and faculty member are organizing ImageArg Shared Task and calling for paper submissions

CS PhD Students Mohamed Elaraby, Zheixong Liu, and Yang Zhong, and CS Professor Diane Litman are organizing ImageArg Shared Task in the 10th ArgMining Workshop, co-located with the...