School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Today is National Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day and to celebrate we've put together a special edition of our monthly newsletter — a quick round-up of just a few of the many, many #AI initiatives underway here at #SCAI. Check out how our faculty team is on the front lines of the principled development of this new technology and how they are playing a leadership role in ensuring that AI is used for social good. #AIAppreciationDay

Gedeon Muhawenayo, a doctoral student working under the supervision of Assistant Professor Hannah Kerner at Arizona State University, is on the front lines of #AI research, helping tackle the planet’s most pressing problems.   Muhawenayo recently attended Data Science Africa(DSA) Summer School, held on the campus of DEDAN KIMATHI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY (DeKUT) in Nyeri, Kenya, where hundreds of students, industry professionals and academics from all over the world collaborated on the theme of "Data Science for Social Good in the Age of Generative AI."   At the event, Muhawenayo led a machine learning for remote sensing workshop, training fellow graduate students on how to deal with large sets of Earth observation data as part of efforts to promote food security.   "Many African countries are prone to a wide range of natural hazards that strain the most vulnerable communities, particularly smallholder farmers," he says. "Advancements in machine learning can support ways to increase harvests for these communities, especially in the face of challenges posed by climate change." Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/gHQwQdfZ #SCAI #PhD #ASUEngineering

Thanks to Arizona State University for the nice coverage of our 💻 cybersecurity 🔒 faculty including Yan Shoshitaishvili and Adam Doupé.

At the #ASUEngineering spring 2024 student convocations, #SCAI awarded 1,824 new degrees, celebrating one of the largest computer science graduating classes in the country and the largest in the history of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.   Director Ross Maciejewski is hard at work, plotting a future course to ensure that graduates remain in demand in the workforce, that the school continues its research mission and the dedicated faculty members are well-supported in their efforts.   ASU Regents Professor Douglas Montgomery, a thought leader in systems engineering who joined the Fulton Schools in 1987, remembers the past and looks forward to the future. “While I am proud of all we have accomplished thus far,” Montgomery says, “I am excited to see what develops and I know Ross Maciejewski is the right choice to guide us to the next stage of our evolution.” Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/g4xPTDux

Thanks so much to our friends at Technology at Arizona State University for this great write up of 'YZ' Yezhou Yang's work in the #GenAI space and his ongoing efforts to ensure all have an opportunity to benefit from emerging technology.

A team of #SCAI student researchers led by Assistant Professor Zhichao Cao has received the 🏆 Best Paper Award 🏆 at the 16th HotStorage: The ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (#HotStorage24) currently underway in Santa Clara, California. Doctoral student Viraj Thakkar, master’s student Jiaxin Dai and undergraduate students Madhumitha Sukumar and Kaushiki Singh co-authored the paper, "Can Modern LLMs Tune and Configure LSM-based Key-Value Stores?" The work explores the possibility of using modern LLMs to construct the automatic, interactive, and comprehensive tuning framework for Log-Structured Merge-Tree-based Key-Value Stores by leveraging the expertise and understanding of LLMs. The HotStorage workshop provides a forum for cutting-edge storage research, a place where researchers and industry practitioners can discuss new opportunities and challenges in storage technology. 🎉 Congrats to all! https://lnkd.in/gBSzfTb7

If you're working with LLMs, this podcast w/ Swaroop Mishra from Google DeepMind will have many tidbits of information you can use 💡 We covered a wide range of topics including: ▶ Instruction Tuning - a technique used to train LLMs like ChatGPT & others ▶ Future of prompt engineering ▶ Extending LLMs from chatbots to planning tools ▶ Candid advice to young engineers/researchers working on this and rabbit holes to avoid. Swaroop is a research scientist at Google-Deepmind on the Gemini team. His research expertise includes instruction tuning and different prompt engineering techniques to improve reasoning and generalization performance in LLMs. Swaroop graduated from the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (ASU) with a Ph.D., with research focused on developing methods that allow models to learn new tasks from instructions. Swaroop has also interned at Microsoft, Allen AI, and Google, and his research on instruction tuning has been influential in the recent developments of LLMs. What questions do you think went unanswered in this podcast? https://lnkd.in/dZeSkCQh

This year, “The Pragmatic Programmer” by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt turns 25! Often placed on lists of most influential programming books of all time, it introduced the world to the concept of rubber duck debugging, or rubberducking. Inspired by a story of a software engineer who would explain his code, line by line, to a rubber duck, rubberducking challenges software engineers to be able to discuss their work in plain language with non-technical people — a process that often results in better design solutions. The #SCAI devil duck is over here chilling by the pool in case anyone has code they need to review.

On behalf of both the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE) and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, I am happy to report that several exciting new projects have been funded for the next fiscal year by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Huan Liu will work with Kai Shu from the Illinois Institute of Technology on a project called, “Countering Misinformation in the Era of Large Language Models.” Erin Chiou and I will work with Mickey Mancenido in the ASU School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences on “Resilience Engineering for Visual Screening in Security Settings (REVS).” I will work with Jingrui He and Hanghang Tong from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on “Privacy-Preserving Analytics for Non-IID Data.” Jia Zou and Yingzhen Yang will work with Chaowei Xiao from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on “A Federated Query Optimizer for Privacy-Preserving Analytics and Machine Learning.” Thanks to all for the hard work and ongoing support of our research mission. For more details about CAOE, see: https://caoe.asu.edu/

SCAI graduate students Utkarsh Nath and Yanchen Wang have published a journal paper in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) titled, "Robust Neural Architecture Search by Cross-Layer Knowledge Distillation." The paper advances the area of #AI model development by jointly considering robustness to adversarial attacks and model compactness, along task-specific performance in the learning objective. They were jointly advised by #SCAI Assistant Professor Yingzhen Yang and Pavan Turaga, professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering — ASU ECEE and director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gfugqz-c 🎉 Congrats to all!