Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
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NL SEMINAR-Visual Recognition beyond Appearances, and its Robotic Applications
Thu, Jan 14, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yezhou Yang, ASU
Talk Title: Visual Recognition beyond Appearances, and its Robotic Applications
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: The goal of Computer Vision, as coined by Marr, is to develop algorithms to answer What are Where at When from visual appearance. The speaker, among others, recognizes the importance of studying underlying entities and relations beyond visual appearance, following an Active Perception paradigm. This talk will present the speaker's efforts over the last decade, ranging from 1. reasoning beyond appearance for visual question answering, image understanding and video captioning tasks, through 2. temporal knowledge distillation with incremental knowledge transfer, till 3. their roles in a Robotic visual learning framework via a Robotic Indoor Object Search task. The talk will also feature the Active Perception Group APGs ongoing projects NSF RI, NRI and CPS, DARPA KAIROS, and Arizona IAM addressing emerging challenges of the nation in autonomous driving, AI security and healthcare domains, at the ASU School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering CIDSE.
Biography: Yezhou Yang is an Assistant Professor at School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University. He is directing the ASU Active Perception Group. His primary interests lie in Cognitive Robotics, Computer Vision, and Robot Vision, especially exploring visual primitives in human action understanding from visual input, grounding them by natural language as well as high level reasoning over the primitives for intelligent robots. Before joining ASU, Dr. Yang was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Vision Lab and the Perception and Robotics Lab, with the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is a recipient of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2011, the NSF CAREER award 2018 and the Amazon AWS Machine Learning Research Award 2019. He receives his Ph.D. from University of Maryland at College Park, and B.E. from Zhejiang University, China.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/lfb5GP-HNRELocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/lfb5GP-HNRE
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar-Historical Applications of NLP
Thu, Jan 21, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Christopher Chu , Di Di
Talk Title: Historical Applications of NLP
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: NLP has vastly improved in the last ten years. These advances can help us better understand history by deciphering old languages and text whose meaning we couldn't understand before. In this talk, I'll be presenting a couple applications of how we can use these techniques. First, we use a known-plaintext attack to decrypt a dictionary code used c.1800 for secret messages between US Army General James Wilkinson and agents of the Spanish Crown. Then, I'll present a method for deciphering Chinese writing, with potential applications to other logographic languages.
Biography: Christopher Chu is a research engineer working on NLP at DiDi AI Labs. We're located about 500 feet away in the other Marina Tower. He has a BASc in robotics engineering, but decided that people are more interesting to talk to than robots. At DiDi Labs, we primarily work on dialog and translation, but branch out into fun projects like these.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/gLKMthceNIQLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/gLKMthceNIQ
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar-Computational Models of Language Change from Diachronic Text
Thu, Jan 28, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sandeep Soni, Georgia Tech
Talk Title: Computational Models of Language Change from Diachronic Text
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: Natural languages undergo change over time. Modeling language change can help uncover latent social factors that modulate change in particular, to answer key social science questions such as who talks to whom, who leads, and who follows. In this talk, I'll present our work over the years that uses timestamped also called diachronic text to link social influence or leadership with language change, combining methods from computational linguistics, machine learning, and network science. First, I show that network influence exerted through strong ties leads to higher adoption of non-standard terms on Twitter's communication network. Next, I propose a method to identify documents at the forefront of semantic change and further show that such documents are more influential in terms of the citations they get across two domains a collection of legal documents and a set of scientific abstracts. Finally, I introduce a method to induce a semantic leadership network between 19th century abolitionist newspapers that helps emphasize quantitatively the important role played by Black and women editors in the abolitionist movement. The combination of these studies demonstrate the variety of domains in which the study of language change is relevant and how computational modeling can help determine the latent influence and leadership relations between sources of interest.
Biography: Sandeep Soni is a PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are in computational social science and digital humanities with an emphasis on using text as data and computational linguistics methods. His PhD thesis is focussed on developing methods to use language change as a way to systematically infer latent influence relationships from language data. He is currently on the job market looking for postdoc and permanent positions.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/4OKrh5uWEr4Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/4OKrh5uWEr4
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
