Events Calendar

NL Seminar -Drinking From The Firehose of Science.

Speaker: Waleed Ammar, Allen Inst of AI (AI2)

Talk Title: Drinking From The Firehose of Science.

Series: NL Seminar

Abstract: REMINDER:

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If you are an outside visitor, please inform us at nlg DASH seminar DASH host AT isi DOT edu beforehand so we will be aware of your attendance and let you in.

Five years ago, I visited ISI to talk about our progress taming the scientific literature in the Semantic Scholar team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. In this talk, I will highlight some of the exciting developments in Semantic Scholar over the past few years, then share with you how we've enabled a wide variety of users and partners to "drink" from the firehose of scientific publications by interfacing with the Semantic Scholar APIs. I will end with an interactive discussion of how we can increase the participation of underrepresented groups in science.

Biography: Waleed Ammar currently leads the Semantic Scholar APIs effort at the Allen Institute for Artificial intelligence (AI2), which enables researchers, practitioners and decision makers to do various computations on the scientific literature in a wide variety of research fields. Before rejoining AI2 this year, Waleed was a senior research scientist at Google, where he helped develop transformer-based models for generating DNA sequences based on PacBio long-reads which significantly reduced variant-calling errors [Nature Biotech'22]. He also helped develop task-oriented dialog systems which are more robust to disfluencies, code-switching and user revisions [arXiv'23]. Prior to joining Google, Waleed led the Semantic Scholar research team's efforts to develop ML-based methods to facilitate access to the literature [e.g., NAACL 19], build a knowledge graph of the scientific literature [NAACL'18], and use this wealth of information to identify systemic social problems in science [JAMA'19]. He also occasionally teaches courses at UW linguistics as an affiliate faculty member. In 2016, Waleed received a Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University. Before pursuing the Ph.D., Waleed was a research engineer at Microsoft Research and a web developer at eSpace Technologies. Outside work, Waleed spends most of his time on the water or in dancing studios.

Host: Jon May and Justin Cho

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

Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsJNCkPEDu8

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual and ISI-Conf Rm#689

WebCast Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsJNCkPEDu8

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Pete Zamar

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