The Columbia Center of AI Technology (CAIT) in collaboration with Amazon was founded in 2020 with a mission to better society through the development and adoption of advanced AI technologies contributing to a more secure, connected, creative, sustainable, healthy, and equitable humanity. A major goal within this mission is to create a community of scholars and practitioners at the leading edge of AI and AI technology development.
The Inaugural Annual CAIT Symposium will bring together researchers, leaders, and experts from academia, industry, and government to discuss advances and new challenges in the field of AI technology.
Spyros Matsoukas is a Distinguished Scientist at Amazon, developing spoken language understanding technology for voice-enabled products such as Amazon Echo. From 1998 to 2013 he worked at Raytheon BBN Technologies, conducting research in acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition, speaker diarization, statistical machine translation, speaker identification, and language identification. He has over 90 publications in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, with 3 best paper awards, and 21 patents.
Angeliki Metallinou is a Senior Applied Science Manager at Amazon Alexa AI, Conversational Understanding. She received her PhD (2013) and Master of Science (2010) in Electrical Engineering, both from the University of Southern California. Her interests and experience lie in the areas of spoken and natural language understanding, dialog systems, deep learning, affective computing and applications for education and healthcare. She has published in the areas of speech, language, dialog, artificial intelligence and multimodal human computer interaction including at Interspeech, ICASSP, AAAI, ACL, NAACL, IEEE Trans. Multimedia, Speech Communication. She has served as an area chair for Interspeech 2016, and as a reviewer for Interspeech, ICASSP, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ACM Multimedia, IEEE Trans. Multimedia, and others.
Elias Bareinboim is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the director of the Causal Artificial Intelligence (CausalAI) Laboratory at Columbia University. His research focuses on causal and counterfactual inference and their applications to data-driven fields in the health and social sciences as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning. His work was the first to propose a general solution to the problem of “data-fusion,” providing practical methods for combining datasets generated under different experimental conditions and plagued with various biases. More recently, Bareinboim has been exploring the intersection of causal inference with decision-making (including reinforcement learning) and explainability (including fairness analysis).
Differential privacy is a parameterized notion of database privacy that gives a mathematically rigorous worst-case bound on the maximum amount of information that can be learned about an individual. We have developed algorithms that satisfy this privacy guarantee and allow for accurate data analysis in a wide variety of computational settings — including machine learning, optimization, statistics, and economics — and are now being deployed in practice.
Rachel Cummings’ research interests lie primarily in data privacy, with connections to machine learning, algorithmic economics, optimization, statistics, and information theory. Her work has focused on problems such as strategic aspects of data generation, incentivizing truthful reporting of data, privacy-preserving algorithm design, impacts of privacy policy, and human decision-making. Cummings received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences from the California Institute of Technology, her MS in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and her BA in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, among many other awards.
We often think of AI as giving computers new abilities, but there is tremendous potential for AI to give people new abilities as well. In this talk, I will show how AI can be used to power assistive technologies — specifically, how to make it possible for people who are blind to play video games.
Brian Smith is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Dept. of Computer Science, where he directs the Computer-Enabled Abilities Laboratory (CEAL). He and his students develop computers that can grant people new abilities, abilities that help people better experience the world. Their research is interdisciplinary and incorporates accessibility, games, AR, AI, sensing, and vision. He is also a research scientist at Snap Research, where he develops new concepts in human–computer interaction (HCI), social computing, games, and augmented reality. He is a member of Snap's HCI Research team and works closely with SnapLab, Snap's hardware division and the team behind Spectacles.
In this talk, I will present some recent work from my group that demonstrates how we can enable robots to leverage their ability to interact with the environment in order to better understand what they see: from discovering objects' identity and 3D geometry, to discovering physical properties of novel objects through different dynamic interactions.
Shuran Song is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. Before that, she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of computer vision and robotics. She is a recipient of several awards including the Best Paper Award at T-RO ‘20, Best Systems Paper Award at RSS ‘19, Best Manipulation Systems Paper Award from Amazon ‘18, and has been finalist for Best Paper Awards at conferences ICRA ‘20, CVPR'19, RSS ‘19, IROS ‘18. She has received TRI Young Faculty Researcher Award, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and Faculty Research Awards from Amazon and JP Morgan.
The CAIT 2021 Symposium Fireside Chat gathers thought leaders from industry, academia, and government to discuss multi-sector partnerships and their importance for advancing AI in areas of social impact. Multi-sector partnerships are becoming increasingly important for solving challenges of national importance, as well as contributing to technology translation, STEM diversity, and workforce development. Featuring leaders from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Agriculture, Amazon, and Columbia University, the panel will discuss how sectors may work together to advance AI and tackle society's most pressing issues.
Dr. Shih-Fu Chang is Interim Dean of Columbia Engineering and Richard Dicker Professor. He leads the education, research, and innovation mission of Columbia Engineering with more than 230 faculty, 1,700 undergraduate students, and 2,700 graduate students. An expert in computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia, Chang received the Kiyo Tomiyasu Award from IEEE and Distinguished Alumni Award from National Taiwan University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, and IEEE, and an elected member of Academia Sinica. He is also an Amazon Scholar and the inaugural director for Columbia Center of AI Technology in collaboration with Amazon.
Dr. Parag Chitnis leads strategic oversight and implementation of NIFA’s programs, which invest $1.75 billion for research and extension activities in food and agricultural sciences. Dr. Chitnis is located in Kansas City where he oversees the agency’s staff and functions.
He came to NIFA in 2015 as the Deputy Director for Institute of Food Production and Sustainability. Prior to joining NIFA, he was the Director for the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF). At both NIFA and NSF, Dr. Chitnis led initiatives at the interface of different disciplines, including biological sciences, agricultural sciences, physical sciences, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.
In his academic career, Dr. Chitnis was a professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology at Iowa State University, and was an assistant professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University. As a researcher and educator at these universities, he received more than $7 million in research, education, and training grants from federal and private sources including funding from NIFA, NSF, NIH, US-Israel BARD, Pioneer Hi-Bred, and Iowa Corn Promotion Board. He has authored over 110 peer-reviewed or invited publications in the areas of plant biochemistry, photosynthesis, computational biology, and proteomics. He has mentored over 50 undergraduate students, MS and PhD students, post-doctoral fellows, and AAAS fellows. Dr. Chitnis has a B.S. in botany/plant breeding from the Konkan Agricultural University in India, an M.S. in genetics and plant breeding from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, and Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Dr. Erwin Gianchandani is the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Senior Advisor for Translation, Innovation, and Partnerships, reporting to the NSF Director. For six years, he was the NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), twice serving as NSF Acting Assistant Director for CISE. In this role, he contributed to the leadership and management of NSF’s CISE directorate, including formulation and implementation of the directorate’s $1 billion annual budget, strategic and human capital planning, and oversight of day-to-day operations. In recent years, he has led the development and launch of several new NSF investments, including Smart & Connected Communities, Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research, and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes. Before joining NSF in 2012, Dr. Gianchandani was the inaugural Director of the Computing Community Consortium, providing leadership to the computing research community in identifying and pursuing audacious, high-impact research directions. He has published extensively and presented at international conferences on computational systems biology. He holds a B.S. in computer science and M.S. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia.
Dr. Prem Natarajan is a Vice President in Alexa and leads a multidisciplinary science, engineering, and product organization which improves customer experience worldwide through advances in dialog modeling, natural language understanding, entity linking and resolution, and related machine learning technologies. Before joining Amazon, he was Executive Director of the Information Sciences Institute and Senior Vice Dean of Engineering at the University of Southern California where he led nationally influential DARPA and IARPA sponsored research efforts in biometrics/face recognition, OCR, natural language processing, media forensics, and forecasting. Prior to that, he served as executive vice president and principal scientist for speech, language, and multimedia at Raytheon BBN Technologies.
Shih-Fu Chang | Interim Dean, Columbia Engineering
Parag R. Chitnis | Associate Director for Programs, Acting Associate Director for Operations, USDA – National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Erwin Gianchandani | Senior Advisor for Translation, Innovation, and Partnerships, National Science Foundation
Prem Natarajan | Vice President in Alexa AI, Amazon