Colloquium Talks

Software development is shaped by constant disruption—from open-source dependency abandonment to generative AI (GenAI) tools fundamentally reshaping how code is written. In this talk, I'll present two lines of work, each examining a different disruption. Finally, I'll outline my research vision for helping developers anticipate and navigate the disruptions of tomorrow—from building AI-powered tools for software supply chain resilience to studying how GenAI is reshaping development team practices and processes.

In this talk, I argue that reasoning over sets is a fundamental challenge for building reliable and controllable LLM systems, and present a unified perspective centered on set-level verification, retrieval, and editing.

 In this talk, I’ll characterize the complex relationship between AI and the environment, as exemplified by LLMs. I’ll describe what we currently know about the positive and negative environmental impacts of LLMs, and identify some of the key challenges to understanding and shaping those impacts moving forward.

Curating models is time-consuming, so I have developed AI tools to help scholars build models of the hidden structure of their digital archives. This talk features a lot of fine art and it is open to anyone interested in AI-enhanced scholarship in the arts and humanities.

In this talk, I present a unified framework for building embodied agents that can see, simulate, and reason. I begin by introducing methods for learning world simulators from data, arguing that visual reasoning—like textual reasoning—benefits from step-by-step processing.

As large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini become increasingly integrated into research and operational workflows, a critical question arises: Can these systems be trusted to behave safely, predictably, and reliably under real-world conditions? This talk explores that question through recent findings, including our own, on how AI models behave when confronted with unexpected or adversarial inputs.

CS PhD students have the opportunity to apply for a CS Travel Award, which grants students $600 in travel assistance when presenting research at a conference. Three CS Travel Award recipients will present their research at this Friday's colloquium. The student presenters and their talk titles are as follows.