Researchers associated with the UC Irvine Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems published more than ten workshop and conference papers at the 2022 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Highlights include an oral presentation by PhD students Alex Boyd and Sam Showalter, with Profs. Smyth and Mandt, on Predictive Querying for Autoregressive Neural Sequence Models; a tutorial by Yibo Yang and Stephan Mandt on Data Compression with Machine Learning; a talk by Prof. Pierre Baldi in the All Things Attention workshop; and papers in workshops on Deep Reinforcement Learning, Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning, and Time Series for Health.

The Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine invites applications for tenure-track or tenured faculty positions beginning July 1, 2023. This faculty search targets applicants with research expertise in all aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning, broadly interpreted. Candidates should follow the online application instructions for Recruit opening JPF07847, and submit materials by December 15, 2022 in order to receive full consideration.

Congratulations to Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi for being named a 2022 Rising Star in Computer Networking and Communications by N2Women. Prof. Jyothi explores innovative applications of machine learning to systems and networking problems, including award-winning recent work characterizing the resilience of the internet to solar superstorms.

Congratulations to CML PhD student Robert Logan, and his advisor Prof. Sameer Singh, who received a Best New Task Paper Award at the 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). Their method, FRUIT: Faithfully Reflecting Updated Information in Text, uses language models to automatically update articles (like those on Wikipedia) when new evidence is obtained. This work is motivated not only by a desire to assist the volunteers who maintain Wikipedia, but by the ways it pushes the boundaries of the NLP field.

Two faculty affiliated with the UCI Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems have been elected as 2021 AAAS Fellows, joining 190 other AAAS Fellows at UC Irvine. Rina Dechter, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, was elected for contributions to computational aspects of automated reasoning and knowledge representation, including search, constraint processing, and probabilistic reasoning, and for service to the computing community. Padhraic Smyth, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director of the UCI Center for Machine Learning, was elected for distinguished contributions to the field of machine learning, particularly the development of statistical foundations and methodologies. Congratulations to them both!

Congratulations to each of Professors Stephan Mandt and Sameer Singh for recently being awarded prestigious CAREER awards for basic research from the National Science Foundation. Professor Mandt’s research will focus on a unified set of mathematical and statistical tools for resource-efficient deep learning, with expected applications to new methods for compressing both neural networks and their data (e.g., images and video), as well as new algorithms for faster training. Professor Singh will develop new techniques and methodologies to address vulnerabilities in current state-of-the-art natural language processing models based on deep learning by developing several techniques in support of more robust training and evaluation, with applications to automated methods for finding and detecting problems in such models, explaining them to users, and fixing them.

Professor Pierre Baldi has published a new text that bridges the gap between deep learning and the natural sciences. Titled Deep Learning in Science (Cambridge University Press, 2021), the text provides readers with a perspective that there is “a principled, foundational approach to machine learning” and readers “are made aware of the many interesting applications in natural sciences as opposed to just in engineering and commerce” (quoting Professor Baldi).

Distinguished Prof. Rina Dechter has been awarded the 2020 Classic Paper Award from the Artificial Intelligence Journal. Given to papers “published at least 15 calendar years ago in the AI Journal that are exceptional in their significance and impact,” this year’s award recognized “Temporal Constraint Networks,” which Dechter co-authored with Itay Meiri and Judea Pearl in 1991.

Read more:  https://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/view_news?id=1866

While researchers know that contemporary natural language processing models aren’t as accurate as their leaderboard performance makes them appear, there hasn’t been a structured way to test them. The best paper award at ACL 2020 went to Prof. Sameer Singh, and collaborators Marco Tulio Ribeiro of Microsoft Research and Tongshuang Wu and Carlos Guestrin at the University of Washington, for their paper Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList.  Their CheckList framework uses a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types to reveal weaknesses in state-of-the-art cloud AI systems.

Read more:  https://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/view_news?id=1817