News

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...

May 11, 2023

Announcing the Spring 2023 Best Capstone Talk Award Winners

The Department of Computer Science gives out awards to the three best presenters for the CS 1900 and CS 1950 capstone courses each semester. The awardees are selected based on peer reviews within...

May 9, 2023

Computer Science Celebrates 2023 Graduates

May 9, 2023

The Class of 2023 from the School of Computing and Information (SCI)’s Department of Computer Science celebrated their accomplishments and looked towards the...

April 21, 2023

CS Student Zhen Wu Receives the 2022-2023 Computer Science Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award

Undergraduate Computer Science student Zhen Wu received the...

March 22, 2023

April 7 Colloquium: "User Control in Adaptive Information Access"

Combining the decision power or AI with the ability of the user to guide and control it brings together the strong sides of artificial and human intelligence and could lead to better results. In this talk, I will review the work of our team and the broader research community focused on adding various kinds of user control to adaptive information access systems and discuss lessons learned, prospects, and challenges of this direction of research.

March 5, 2023

April 21 Colloquium: "Towards Inclusive and Equitable Human Language Technologies"

I present three of our recent works: 1) Discourse-aware generation models for automatic social media moderation and mediation, 2) Sign language processing, and 3) Equitable and human-like dialogue generation models based on learning theory. Finally, I describe my research vision: Building inclusive and collaborative communicative systems and grounded artificial intelligence models by leveraging the cognitive science of language use alongside formal methods of machine learning.

January 20, 2023

February 24 Colloquium: "The Curious Case of Carbon efficiency in Sustainable Systems"

While current research has mostly focused on reducing the energy footprint, in this talk, we will discuss how improving energy efficiency does not translate to the goal of zero emissions. More importantly, carbon efficiency can be optimized independently of energy efficiency. Toward this end, I will present some examples of mitigating emissions and some directions toward designing carbon-efficient infrastructures. 

January 20, 2023

February 3 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, existing evaluations do not reflect the probabilistic nature of commonsense knowledge. To fill in the gap, I will discuss a method of retrieving commonsense related question answer distributions from human annotators and a novel method of generative evaluation. 

January 5, 2023

January 27 Colloquium: "Visualization of the Geometry and Dynamics of Hidden Unit Space"

The juxtaposition of pattern representations is reconfigured at each layer of a multi-layered perceptron. As the activity propagates through the network, the representations are transformed through a systematic progression such that the representation at the penultimate layer is computable at the final stage (e.g., linearly separability for a classification task).