- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

John Yang will present his MSE talk "Towards an Enhanced, Faithful, and Adaptable Web Interaction Environment" on Monday, April 24, 2023 at 3pm in CS 301.
by Gradinfo 20 Apr '23

20 Apr '23

John Yang will present his MSE talk "Towards an Enhanced, Faithful, and Adaptable Web Interaction Environment" on Monday, April 24, 2023 at 3pm in CS 301. The members of his committee are as follows: Karthik Narasimhan (adviser) and Danqi Chen (reader) All are welcome to attend. Talk title and abstract follow below. Title: Towards an Enhanced, Faithful, and Adaptable Web Interaction Environment Abstract: We identify key areas of improvement for WebShop, an e-commerce shopping environment for training decision making language agents. Specifically, shortcomings in: 1) faithfulness of the reward function to human evaluation, 2) comprehensiveness of its content, and 3) human participation required for generating instructions has hindered WebShop’s promises to be a scalable real-world environment. To solve these issues, we first incorporate greater faithfulness to human evaluation by designing a new reward function to capture lexical similarities and synonyms. Second, we identify customer reviews, similar products, and customer FAQs as missing semantic components that are most helpful to human execution of the task from surveying 75 respondents. Finally, we reformulate the attribute tagging problem as a extractive short-phrase prediction task to enhance scalability. Our V2 reward function closes the gap between the scores of the WebShop’s automated reward function (from 81.5% to 87.7%) and human evaluation (89.9%). Our attribute tagging approach achieves an accuracy of 72.2% with a t5-3b model fine tuned on 2, 000 training data points, showing potential to automate the instruction creation pipeline.

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Kathryn Wantlin will present her MSE talk "Spatial Birth-Death Point Process Models for Controllable Morphogenesis" on Thursday, April 20, 2023 at 2pm in CS 301.
by Gradinfo 20 Apr '23

20 Apr '23

Kathryn Wantlin will present her MSE talk "Spatial Birth-Death Point Process Models for Controllable Morphogenesis" on Thursday, April 20, 2023 at 2pm in CS 301. The members of her committee are as follows: Ryan Adams (adviser), and Naomi Leonard (MAE, reader) All are welcome to attend. Title and abstract follow below. Title: Spatial Birth-Death Point Process Models for Controllable Morphogenesis Abstract: Controlling morphogenetic processes - where the total mass of agents varies as the system evolves - is a particularly difficult inverse design problem. In this thesis, we present a model for such bio-inspired shape formation using spatial point processes, a popular framework for describing many types of spatio-temporal reproductive processes. We frame the problem as one of controlling spatial birth-death processes, and given a target stationary distribution for the cell-like points, construct a continuous-time Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure by which the points reproduce to achieve and maintain the target shape. Within this framework, we consider several types of point processes, beginning with the spatially uncorrelated Poisson process and extending to the repulsive Strauss process, demonstrating how the combination of global and local information allows the points to determine their relative birth-death rates. To improve biological plausibility, we also extend the procedure to include reversible split-and-merge transitions and spatial Hawkes-based birth-death rates, thereby modeling the locality of cell division. This stochastic, continuous-time MCMC formulation of the problem possesses desirable properties for multi-agent systems, including recovery from partial destruction via ergodicity of the constructed Markov chain, and enables extensions into marked spatial point processes and periodic patterns.

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Princeton Robotics Seminar: Renee Zhao, Friday April 21
by Emily C. Lawrence 19 Apr '23

19 Apr '23

Speaker: Renee Zhao, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University Date: Friday, April 21, 2023 Time: 11am eastern time Location: Computer Science 105 Event page: [ https://robo.princeton.edu/seminar | https://robo.princeton.edu/seminar ] Title: Multifunctional Origami Robots Abstract: In this talk, I will introduce our recent work on origami mechanisms and actuation strategies for applications spanning from biomedical devices to foldable space structures. The first topic is magnetically actuated millimeter-scale origami medical robots for effective amphibious locomotion in severely confined spaces or aqueous environments. The origami robots are based on the Kresling origami, whose thin shell structure 1) provides an internal cavity for drug storage, 2) permits torsion-induced contraction as a crawling mechanism and a pumping mechanism for controllable liquid medicine dispensing, 3) serves as propellers that spin for propulsion to swim, 4) offers anisotropic stiffness to overcome the large resistance from the severely confined spaces in biomedical environments. For the second part of my talk, the concept of hexagonal ring origami folding mechanism will be introduced as a strategy for deployable/foldable structures for space applications. The hexagonal rings can tessellate 2D/3D surfaces and each ring can snap to its stable folded configuration with only 10.6% of the initial area. Through finite-element analysis and the rod model, snap-folding of the hexagonal ring with slight geometric modification and residual strain are studied for easy folding of the ring to facilitate the design and actuation of hexagonal ring origami assemblies for functional foldable structures with extreme packing ratio. Bio: Renee Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Renee received her PhD degree in Solid Mechanics from Brown University in 2016. She spent two years as a postdoc associate at MIT working on modeling of soft composites. Before Renee joined Stanford, she was an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University from 2018 to 2021. Renee’s research concerns the development of stimuli-responsive soft composites and shape morning mechanisms for multifunctional robotic systems. Renee is a recipient of the NSF Career Award (2020), AFOSR YIP (2023), ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics award (2021), the 2022 ASME Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal, and the 2022 ASME Henry Hess Early Career Publication Award.

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Ryan Torok will present his MSE talk "Leveraging Sandboxes for a Minimally Invasive Browser Fingerprinting Defense" on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 at 2pm in CS 401.
by Nicki Mahler 18 Apr '23

18 Apr '23

Ryan Torok will present his MSE talk "Leveraging Sandboxes for a Minimally Invasive Browser Fingerprinting Defense" on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 at 2pm in CS 401. Advisor: Amit Levy Reader: Jonathan Mayer Title: Leveraging Sandboxes for a Minimally Invasive Browser Fingerprinting Defense Abstract: We present Sandcastle, an entropy-based browser fingerprinting defense that aims to minimize its interference with legitimate web applications. Sandcastle allows developers to partition code that operates on identifiable information into sandboxes to prove to the browser the information cannot be sent in any network request. Meanwhile, sandboxes may make full use of identifiable information on the client side, including writing to dedicated regions of the Document Object Model. For applications where this policy is too strict, Sandcastle provides an expressive cashier that allows precise control over the granularity of data that is leaked to the network. These features allow Sandcastle to eliminate most or all of the noise added to the outputs of identifiable APIs by Chrome’s Privacy Budget framework, the current state of the art in entropy-based fingerprinting defenses. Enabling unlimited client-side use of identifiable information allows for a much more comprehensive set of web applications to run under a fingerprinting defense, such as 3D games and video streaming, and provides a mechanism to expand the space of APIs that can be introduced to the web ecosystem without sacrificing privacy.

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CITP Lecture: Peter Henderson, Tuesday, April 18 at 4:30pm
by Emily C. Lawrence 14 Apr '23

14 Apr '23

CITP Lecture Speaker: Peter Henderson, Stanford University Date: Tuesday, April 18 Time: 4:30pm EST Location: CS 105 Host: Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) Event page: https://citp.princeton.edu/event/citp-lecture-henderson/ Title: Aligning Machine Learning, Law, and Policy for Responsible Real-World Deployments Abstract: Machine learning (ML) is being deployed to a vast array of real-world applications with profound impacts on society. ML can have positive impacts, such as aiding in the discovery of new cures for diseases and improving government transparency and efficiency. But it can also be harmful: reinforcing authoritarian regimes, scaling the spread of disinformation, and exacerbating societal biases. As we rapidly move toward systemic use of ML in the real world, there are many unanswered questions about how to successfully use ML for social good while preventing its potential harms. Many of these questions inevitably require pursuing a deeper alignment between ML, law, and policy. Are certain algorithms truly compliant with current laws and regulations? Is there a better design that can make them more tuned to the regulatory and policy requirements of the real world? Are laws, policies, and regulations sufficiently informed by the technical details of ML algorithms, or will they be ineffective and out-of-sync? In this talk, we will discuss ways to bring together ML, law, and policy to address these questions. We will draw on real-world examples throughout the talk, including a unique real-world collaboration with the Internal Revenue Service. We will show how investigating questions of alignment between ML, law, and policy can advance core research in ML, drive interdisciplinary work, and reimagine how we think about certain laws and policies. It is Henderson’s hope that this agenda will help us lead to more effective and responsible ways of deploying ML in the real world, so that we steer toward positive impacts and away from potential harms. Bio: Peter Henderson is a joint J.D.-Ph.D. (Computer Science, AI) candidate at Stanford University where he is advised by Dan Jurafsky for his Ph.D. and Dan Ho for my J.D. at Stanford Law School. He is also an OpenPhilanthropy AI Fellow and a Graduate Student Fellow at the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab. At Stanford Law School. Henderson co-led the Domestic Violence Pro Bono Project, worked on client representation with the Three Strikes Project, and contributed to the Stanford Native Law Pro Bono Project. Previously, he was advised by David Meger and Joelle Pineau for his M.Sc. at McGill University and the Montréal Institute for Learning Algorithms. Henderson has spent time as a software engineer and applied scientist at Amazon AWS/Alexa and worked with Justice Cuéllar at the California Supreme Court. He is a part-time researcher with the Internal Revenue Service Research, Applied Analytics and Statistics Division, a technical advisor at the Institute for Security+Technology. His research focuses on aligning machine learning, law, and policy for responsible real-world deployments. This alignment process is two-fold: (1) guided by law, policy and ethics, develop general AI systems capable of safely tackling longstanding challenges in government and society; (2) empowered by a deep technical understanding of AI, make sure that laws & policies keep general AI systems safe and beneficial for all. Some of his work has received coverage by TechCrunch, Science, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and more. He also occasionally posts a roundup of news at the intersection of AI, Law, and Policy, the latest of which is here. Overall, he is interested in a wide range of other technical machine learning research, policy, and legal work.

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Yushan Su will present her FPO "Making Neural Network Models More Efficient" on Wednesday, May 10, 2023 at 10am in Friend 202.
by Nicki Mahler 13 Apr '23

13 Apr '23

Yushan Su will present her FPO " Making Neural Network Models More Efficient" on Wednesday, May 10, 2023 at 10am in Friend 202. The members of her committee are as follows: Examiners: Kai Li (adviser), Wyatt Lloyd, and Karthik Narasimhan; Readers: Ravi Netravali and Olga Troyanskaya. Please see title and abstract below. All are welcome to attend. Complex machine learning tasks typically require large neural network models. However, training and inference on neural models require substantial compute power and large memory footprints, and incur significant cost. My thesis studies methods to make neural networks efficient at a relatively low cost. First, we explore how to utilize CPU servers for training and inference. CPU servers are more readily available, have larger memories, and cost less than GPUs or hardware accelerators. However, they are much less efficient for training and inference tasks. My thesis studies how to design efficient software kernels for sparse neural networks that allow unstructured pruning to achieve efficiency of training or inference with minimum accuracy losses. Our evaluation shows that our sparse kernels can achieve 6.4x-20.0x speedups at different sparsities over the commonly used Intel MKL sparse library. Second, we study how to achieve high-throughput inference for large models. We explore ways to combine data multiplexing with pruning. We find that combining the two approaches can achieve better throughput than using each approach alone for a given accuracy loss. We then propose an automatic method to find parameters for such combinations to maximize inference throughput given an accuracy loss budget. We show that the proposed combining can improve Transformer models throughput by 7.5-29.5X at different accuracy thresholds, which is higher than using either approach alone.

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From Big Data To Equitable Health: Princeton Precision Health Spring Workshop May 2
by Emily C. Lawrence 13 Apr '23

13 Apr '23

Please save May 2, 2023, from 9:30 am - 5:00 pm, for the first Princeton Precision Health (PPH) workshop on interdisciplinary, date-driven approaches for precision medicine. We will bring together biomedical researchers, clinicians, computer scientists, ethicists, and social scientists to discuss a wide range of topics, working toward our goal of enabling more responsive, equitable, and precisely targeted health care. Registration is free but required for an accurate head count for breakfast and lunch: [ https://forms.gle/XFa4RSNhcrDTo5gp7 | https://forms.gle/XFa4RSNhcrDTo5gp7 ] Confirmed participants include: Matthias Kretzler, MD, Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor, Internal Medicine, University of Michigan. Sridhar Venkatapuram, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Global Health and Philosophy. Deputy Director, Global Health Institute. Director of Global Health Education and Training. King’s College London. Mona Singh, Wang Family Professor in Computer Science. Professor of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University. Coleen Murphy, James A. Elkins Professor in the Life Sciences. Professor of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Director of the Paul Glenn Laboratories for Aging Research at Princeton University. Ian Peebles, Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Research Associate in Bioethics at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. David Kinney, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Science of Values at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Emily Foster-Hanson, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Science of Values at Princeton University (Current); Assistant Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College (Fall 2023). Hope to see you there! Olga Troyanskaya *************************************************************** Olga Troyanskaya Director, Princeton Precision Health Professor of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics Princeton University

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ECE Seminar: Vanessa Sanchez, Stanford University TODAY at 4:30pm
by Emily C. Lawrence 13 Apr '23

13 Apr '23

ECE SEMINAR Speaker: Vanessa Sanchez, Stanford University Day: Thursday, April 13, 2023 Time: 4:30 PM Location: B205 Engineering Quadrangle Host: Jaime Fernández Fisac Title: Textiles for Soft Wearable Robotics Abstract: Wearable robots and devices-garments with embedded elements that actuate to change shape or apply forces to the wearer, typically based on signals from integrated sensors-offer promise for assistive and augmentative applications including rehabilitative gloves, haptic devices, and dynamically thermoregulating clothing. Early iterations of wearables from the 50s and 60s primarily took the form of rigid exoskeletons; however, in the past twenty years, a growing subset of this field has transitioned to the use of soft components and materials to improve portability, accessibility, fit, and comfort, guided in part by advances in the related field of soft robotics. Based on the unique requirements for wearables, including personalization for varied bodies and low cost for accessibility, automated and highly customizable textile-compatible manufacturing strategies must be developed to support the fabrication and integration of all the necessary components (sensors, actuators, interconnections). This seminar will explore the intersection of knowledge from the field of textile manufacturing with the needs of soft robots and devices, specifically focusing on wearable applications, including performance metrics, material and component choices, and fabrication strategies. Several integrated design and fabrication platforms will be presented in the context of their ability to create constituent components for wearable robots and devices. Bio: Vanessa is a fashion-designer-turned-engineer working to make our clothing smarter and more assistive through focusing on the intersection of materials, manufacturing, and robotics. She currently conducts research on supramolecular shape memory polymer fibers as an NSF MPS-Ascend Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. She attended The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) for fashion design and later graduated with a BS from the Fiber Science program at Cornell University, after which she obtained her PhD at Harvard University in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering with a focus on soft robotic textiles as part of the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory. Her PhD was supported by the DoD NDSEG Fellowship and the GEM Fellowship, and her resulting work has been featured in Vice, Wired, and Engadget. She has been named to the list of 50 Women in Robotics You Need to Know, recognized as an ACS CAS Future Leader, and selected for Forbes 30 Under 30.

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CS Colloquium Speaker Rika Antonova TODAY at 12:30pm
by Emily C. Lawrence 13 Apr '23

13 Apr '23

Speaker: Rika Antonova, Stanford University Date: Tuesday, April 4 Time: 12:30pm EST Location: CS 105 Host: Szymon Rusinkiewicz Event page: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/26378 Title: Enabling Self-Sufficient Robot Learning Abstract: Autonomous exploration and data-efficient learning are important ingredients for helping machine learning handle the complexity and variety of real-world interactions. In this talk, I will describe methods that provide these ingredients and serve as building blocks for enabling self-sufficient robot learning. First, I will outline a family of methods that facilitate active global exploration. Specifically, they enable ultra data-efficient Bayesian optimization in reality by leveraging experience from simulation to shape the space of decisions. In robotics, these methods enable success with a budget of only 10-20 real robot trials for a range of tasks: bipedal and hexapod walking, task-oriented grasping, and nonprehensile manipulation. Next, I will describe how to bring simulations closer to reality. This is especially important for scenarios with highly deformable objects, where simulation parameters influence the dynamics in unintuitive ways. The success here hinges on finding a good representation for the state of deformables. I will describe adaptive distribution embeddings that provide an effective way to incorporate noisy state observations into modern Bayesian tools for simulation parameter inference. This novel representation ensures success in estimating posterior distributions over simulation parameters, such as elasticity, friction, and scale, even for scenarios with highly deformable objects and using only a small set of real-world trajectories. Lastly, I will share a vision of using distribution embeddings to make the space of stochastic policies in reinforcement learning suitable for global optimization. This research direction involves formalizing and learning novel distance metrics on this space and will support principled ways of seeking diverse behaviors. This can unlock truly autonomous learning, where learning agents have incentives to explore, build useful internal representations and discover a variety of effective ways of interacting with the world. Bio: Rika is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and a recipient of the NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship. Rika completed her Ph.D. work on data-efficient simulation-to-reality transfer at KTH. Earlier, she obtained a research Master's degree from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, Rika was a software engineer at Google, first in the Search Personalization group, then in the Character Recognition team (developing open-source OCR engine Tesseract).

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Nikhil Pimpalkhare will present an MSE talk "Context-Free Counter-Based Procedure Summarization" on April 26, 2023 at 4pm in CS 402
by Nicki Mahler 12 Apr '23

12 Apr '23

Nikhil Pimpalkhare will present an MSE talk entitled "Context-Free Counter-Based Procedure Summarization" on April 26, 2023 at 4pm in CS 402. The committee is as follows: Zachary Kincaid (adviser) and David Walker (reader) All are welcome to attend. Title: "Context-Free Counter-Based Procedure Summarization". My abstract is as follows: Abstract: Program analyses aim to formally reason about program behavior without ever running them. A typical structure of a program analysis is to compute a logical summary of an input program that over-approximates its behavior as narrowly as possible, then use automated reasoning algorithms to prove statements about program behavior. This paper addresses procedure summarization for a particularly challenging domain, nonlinear recursive programs, in a way that is both compositional and monotone. We summarize program transformations using vector addition systems with resets (VASR), a model that is simultaneously strong enough to capture interesting numerical behavior and weak enough for its reachability to remain computable. We show how to compute a VASR that is a best abstraction of an input program, how to compute the reachability of a VASR-weighted pushdown system, and how to combine these algorithms to produce summaries of programs. We additionally introduce a novel method to synthesize linear bounds on recursive depth, increasing the specificity of our summary. Together, these techniques combine for a summarization procedure which is performant, powerful, and predictable.

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