Newsletter July 2022

By the numbers:

3 RIT colleges were the homes of 16 Spring 2022 Trainees
4 research tracks
14 AWARE-AI Faculty
23 AWARE-AI Supporters

Photo: AWARE-AI Faculty Gabriel Diaz, Rain Bosworth, Reynold Bailey, Matt Huenerfauth, Ferat Sahin, Kristen Shinohara, Chris Kanan, Cissi Alm, and Esa Rantanen. Not in photo: Jamison Heard, and affiliates Alex Ororbia, Roshan Peiris, Garreth Tigwell, Marcos Zampieri.

Message from the Director

The NSF-funded AWARE-AI NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program launched its operations in Spring 2022 with a cohort of pilot Trainees from RIT doctoral and Master’s STEM programs. Together with the AWARE-AI Team, I am excited to bring our first newsletter to you, highlighting facets of how AWARE-AI has embarked on its journey at Rochester Institute of Technology.

AWARE-AI seeks to bring together RIT faculty and Trainees in convergent AI research across four tracks and comprehensive programming that aim to close skill gaps to advance AI, create a vibrant research community to nurture next-generation scholars with skills in cross-disciplinary human-sensing AI, and diversify the AI research community at our university and beyond.

The program allows Trainees to gain access to integrated research and educational programming, mentoring and networking support, career-development and leadership opportunities, and assistance such as travel, seed funding, and other support.

We invite RIT graduate students and faculty in STEM programs to join us on this journey:

The annual application deadline for student traineeships is March 1, with details on what to submit at https://www.rit.edu/nrtai/benefits-and-applying
Faculty are invited to contact us about affiliations
RIT graduate students are welcome to participate in our open events

We thank the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Office of the Provost, the RIT Graduate School, as well as program partners, faculty, members of the external independent advisory committee and the internal advisory board, and program supporters for their commitment to AWARE-AI’s successful trajectory. Finally, we especially recognize AWARE-AIs Trainees for embarking on this journey as future leaders in AI!

For timely updates, please follow us on Twitter (@awareainrt) and Instagram (@rit_awareai).

I welcome you to reach out with questions to the NRT Team by emailing awareainrt@rit.edu, stopping by GOL-2279, or calling 585-475-2372. Looking forward to hearing from you.

-Cissi

Explore AWARE-AI at RIT

Photo:

Trainee Karthik Subramanian, with NRT faculty Ferat Sahin (advisor), speaking about research integrating VR into human-sensing robotics at the AWARE-AI NRT Retreat in March 2022.

Select Achievements

AWARE-AI Trainees hosted exhibits at Imagine RIT in April 2022
Trainee Matthew Seita’s work involving NRT faculty Kristen Shinohara and Matt Huenerfauth (advisor) was recognized with an honorable mention at CHI 2022
NRT faculty and Assistant Professor Rain Bosworth was announced Fellow of the Psychonomic Society
Trainee Celal Savur presented in the CHAI seminar series and will soon defend his PhD dissertation in KGCOE
NRT-affiliate Assistant Professor Alexander Ororbia publishedin Nature Communications; the article was also selected as an editor’s choice in its area
Trainee Rajesh Titung had a paper accepted to an upcoming NAACL 2022 workshop, co-authored with NRT faculty Cecilia O. Alm (advisor)
Trainee Emily Kuang, advised by NRT faculty Kristen Shinohara, participated in the CRA-WP Cohort for Women and also presented at CHI 2022
Several NRT faculty completed an American Sign Language course taught by Danielle Graybill, NTID
AWARE-AI was noted in the President's Report 2022

Trainee Spotlights

Arianna Giguere

Arianna Giguere is a PhD student in Imaging Science working with Associate Professor Gabriel Diaz in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. She graduated from the University of Maine in 2020 with a B.S. in Physics and a minor in Mathematics and came to RIT to pursue her interests in human vision research and virtual reality. Her work focuses on the development of vision rehabilitation methods for people who have acquired vision loss due to stroke. She is motivated to advance her understanding of deep learning and artificial intelligence as AI can be a useful tool for processing data about human behavior. In her free time, she enjoys playing soccer, hiking, skiing, exploring local events year round, and painting.

Matthew Seita

Matthew Seita is a PhD student in Computing and Information Sciences, advised by Professor Matt Huenerfauth of the School of Information. Matthew's research focuses on how to support communication during small group meetings between Deaf or Hard of Hearing individuals and their hearing colleagues, including how captions based on automatic speech recognition may be useful in this context, as well as tools for encouraging beneficial communication behaviors among the hearing individuals. His work is integrated with the research aims of the NRT’s Human-Computer Interaction research track. During spring 2022, Matthew was first-author on a paper presented at the ACM CHI 2022 conference that won an Honorable Mention Award in the best-paper competition at the conference.

News

AWARE-AI Annual Retreat

The AWARE-AI program hosted its first annual retreat on March 23-24.

The retreat featured two invited keynote speakers. On the first day, Dr. Daniel Hannon of Tufts University delivered a talk on Building Literacy in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Future Generations of Technology-Minded People. On the second day, Dr. Ajay Divakaran of SRI International at Princeton spoke about Using Hierarchies of Skills to Assess and Achieve Automatic Multimodal Comprehension.

Spotlight on Research Track: Human-sensing AI Hardware

A participant is working with two industrial collaborative robots and a mobile robot.

Dr. Ferat Sahin and his Trainees have been conducting research studies with human participants interacting with collaborative robots as part of the research track focusing on AI hardware. In this work, the interactions of participants with industrial collaborative robots are observed while physiological signals are collected from the subjects. This research addresses the goals of the research track towards understanding how comfortable and safe humans are in their physical interaction with the robot during collaborative activities.

Piloting Lab Rotation Visits for NRT Trainees

AWARE-AI Trainees are guided by NRT core and affiliated faculty to advance human-sensing AI in four research tracks focused on software, hardware, human-computer interaction, and cognitive models. Lab rotations across around ten associated research labs allow Trainees to gain valuable cross-disciplinary insights into the work being conducted in other research tracks and shared experiences for nurturing convergent research.

New Human Factors in AI Course

RIT’s College of Liberal Arts has introduced a new course: PSYC 719 Human Factors in Artificial Intelligence. Offered for the first time in Fall 2022, the course is led by AWARE-AI faculty Esa Rantanen, right, and meets on Wednesdays from 1:00 to 1:50 p.m. on campus. In addition to Trainees, the course is open for enrollment to graduate students across disciplines at the Henrietta campus.

View description from RIT’s Course Catalog >

Spotlight on Spring 2022 Events

AWARE-AI organized a Mentor Café during RIT’s Graduate Education Week.

NRT faculty members Kristen Shinohara and Rain Bosworth, and GCCIS Assistant Professors Nidhi Rastogi and Christian Newman offered advice and networking in an AWARE-AI Mentor Café during RIT’s Graduate Education Week in April.
Dr. Taj Smith, RIT’s Director of Diversity Education, offered a workshop in February about Building a Foundation for Inclusive Research for NRT Trainees and RIT graduate students. Dr. Smith also offered a two-part workshop for faculty professional development for which AWARE-AI partnered with the GCCIS iSchool as sponsor.
The NRT hosted two roundtable conversations. The first focused on grant writing and featured Drs. Linwei Wang and Nathan Cahill, Senior Research Administrator David Harrison from Sponsored Research Services, and NSF GRFP awardee Matthew Seita. In the second roundtable, the audience discussed trends in continual machine learning with Associate Professors Travis Desell and Chris Kanan, and Dr. Tyler Hayes, who recently graduated from the PhD program in Imaging Science.

Explore AWARE-AI at RIT