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Events for December 12, 2019

  • NL Seminar-Tightly Connecting Vision and Language

    Thu, Dec 12, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Soravit Beer Changpinyo , Google AI

    Talk Title: Tightly Connecting Vision and Language

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Remarkable progress has been made at the intersection of vision and language. While showing great promise, current vision and language models do not function well in the wild. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts aiming to bridge this gap for the tasks of image captioning and visual question answering. I will first describe several practical limitations of current benchmarks as a yardstick for grounded language understanding and visual reasoning. Then, I will describe our simple approach to transfer learning, where we leverage large-scale ultrafine grained data as a means to address the long tail of language. Finally, given these results, I will outline future directions and survey a variety of on-going work along the line of making vision and language research useful.


    Biography: Soravit Changpinyo is a Software Engineer at Google AI. His research interests are in machine learning with applications to computer vision and natural language processing. Prior to joining Google, he was a PhD candidate and an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California, advised by Fei Sha.

    Host: Emily Sheng

    More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar

    Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/unxRW/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Conf Room 689

    WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/unxRW/

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar

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  • Sonny Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Thu, Dec 12, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Katherine (Trina) McMahon, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin - Madison

    Talk Title: Ecogenomics of freshwater microbial communities

    Abstract: Freshwater bacterial communities underpin all biogeochemical cycles in lakes and are outstanding model systems with which to study ecological and evolutionary processes in microbes. We are partnered with the North Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research site and have access to a rich time series of microbial community data extending nearly two decades. In this talk I will compare patterns of microbial community assembly and dynamics in two sharply contrasting lakes using 16S rRNA gene tag sequencing, explore population structure using single cell genomics and metagenomics, and propose a new genomics-based framework for thinking about traits within complex microbial communities.


    Biography: My students and I study the microbial ecology of both natural and engineered systems. We use molecular tools to investigate microbial community structure and function in lakes and activated sludge. More recently, we have been using high-frequency environmental sensor networks to measure important variables that we know influence bacterial communities. Sensor data provided through the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (http://www.gleon.org) guides our adaptive sampling efforts and provides rich contextual data for our studies of lake bacterial community ecology. We are particularly interested in phosphorus as a nutrient driving eutrophication, and the role that bacteria play in phosphorus cycling. We are also engaged in metagenomic and post-genomic approaches to dissecting the metabolism of bacteria specialized in the sequestration of phosphorus in activated sludge. This information will ultimately lead to the construction of more predictive mechanistic and ecosystem-scale models to describe such processes as wastewater treatment and freshwater nutrient cycling

    Host: Dr. Adam Smith

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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