Newsletter September 2023

By the numbers:

4 MSI visits by trainees in Spring 2023
2 AWARE-AI archives launched - Materials Archive and Video Archive
3 roundtables on advanced AI research topics in Spring 2023
4 PhD students from Dublin visiting RIT

Four students sit around a table with laptops open in front of them, they face the camera and smile.

Photo: Trainees participate in the Fall 2023 hackathon. Left to right: Hagar Hendy, Tlamelo Makati, Nam Trinh, and Michael Peechatt.

Photo: Trainees Rajesh Titung, Faithful Onwuegbuche, Gabriel Park, and Cedric Bone participate in the Fall 2023 hackathon.

Message from the Director

The AWARE-AI program has entered into its second full cohort year, and I am delighted to provide an update about recent AWARE-AI activities on behalf of the team. In the spring semester, four AWARE-AI trainees visited minority-serving institutions for the first time. They presented their research, connected with faculty and administrators, and experienced what a campus interview visit may look like. More recently, AWARE-AI welcomed its new cohort of 15 trainees with an August onboarding boot camp, which spanned an intense three-day program that included two plenary talks on timely topics delivered by Dr. Chris Callison-Burch and RIT alumnus Dr. Brendan David-John.

In addition, AWARE-AI has been awarded supplemental funding via NSF 23-013. This supplement will enable four PhD students from RIT a unique experience in Dublin, spending six weeks at the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning, which also organizes a traineeship program. We are also thrilled to have been on the receiving end in this cooperation, hosting four PhD students from Dublin universities for six weeks: Nam Trinh (Dublin City University), Tlamelo Makati (Technological University Dublin), Faithful Chiagoziem Onwuegbuche (University College Dublin), and Patrick McEnroe (University College Dublin). Our guests have participated in AWARE-AI’s research tracks and additional educational traineeship programming, as well as a matched-peer initiative that aims to connect students from Rochester and Dublin at a deeper level over their 12 shared weeks of interaction in Rochester and Dublin. We are extremely excited about this doctoral student mobility partnership and its potential to shape long-term connections, research constellations, strengthened international and cultural skills, and scholarly product outcomes for doctoral student researchers in AI across international contexts. The AWARE-AI executive committee would like to extend special thanks to PI Dr. Brian Mac Namee and Professor Sarah Jane Delaney for spearheading this cooperation in Dublin, and to RIT Associate Provosts Ryne Raffaelle and James Myers and to Lyndsey McGrath from RIT Global for their commitment to enabling this collaborative vision.

Moreover, besides various trainee-focused activities, we are proud to offer a spectacular program of events widely available to RIT graduate students this semester. We are also preparing for the program’s Spring 2024 offerings. As always, we welcome suggestions from our stakeholders. Additionally, we are engaged in outreach and recruitment for the next academic year. AWARE-AI has grown the number of associated STEM graduate programs to 19 PhD and MS programs. This includes the new Artificial Intelligence degree program and degree programs in Color Science, Computing Security, Microsystems Engineering, and Cognitive Science. We welcome RIT students’ applications to AWARE-AI and letters of support for applicants, which should be received by AWARE-AI’s application deadline on March 1, 2024. Application-related questions can be directed to awareainrt@rit.edu.

Finally, we would also like to alert you to AWARE-AI’s annual four-day winter retreat which will occur in January 2024. It will feature a new comprehensive schedule of plenary talks, career-advancing and technical tutorial sessions, trainee interim progress reports, and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility discussions. Several AWARE-AI trainees will also pursue internships at national labs or industrial organizations in Summer 2024. We thank our existing partners for their engagement, and we welcome organizations interested in entering into a new partnership with us to reach out.

On behalf of the participants and faculty, I would like to conclude by expressing our appreciation to all readers. It takes an exceptional university community commitment to deliver an initiative like AWARE-AI. Thank you, and please continue to stay engaged.

Best wishes from AWARE-AI for a productive Fall 2023.

-Cissi

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Select Achievements

Trainee Justin Namba stands on the right and faces away from the camera to explain about the AWARE-AI NRT to visitors.The large NRT poster sits on the left, with the table with flyers in the middle.

Photo: Trainee Justin Namba spoke about his work in AWARE-AI with visitors at Imagine RIT in Spring 2023.

Before the summer, trainee Matthew Seita successfully defended his dissertation “Designing Automatic Speech Recognition Technologies to Improve Accessibility for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People in Small Group Meetings” for the PhD degree in Computing and Information Sciences.
Matt Altobelli graduated with an MS in Experimental Psychology in May 2024.

NRT Faculty Alex Ororbia was awarded an AFRL Summer Faculty Fellowship. His advisee trainee Will Gebhart also conducted research at AFRL over the summer.
Trainees completed summer internships: Justin Namba and Michael Peechatt at AFRL, Arianna Giguere at Apple, and Margaret Gray at BlueCross BlueShield.

Rajesh Titung presented a poster at SIGCSE 2023 in Toronto.

Trainees from across AWARE-AI research tracks presented an exhibit about the program at Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival.

Trainee Spotlights

Emily Kuang

Emily is a PhD student in Computing and Information Sciences, advised by Dr. Kristen Shinohara, Research Track Lead for HCI in AI. In the 2022-2023 academic year, she was a member of the Trainee Council for the AWARE-AI program. As part of this council, Emily attended Executive Committee meetings, organized meetings with other representatives, and planned activities for trainees such as team-building exercises and a field trip during the winter retreat.

Emily's doctoral research focuses on the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and User Experience (UX). Over the past two summers, Emily gained experience working as a UX Research Intern at Meta Reality Labs. Through this role, she was able to witness the time constraints that UX evaluators in the industry often face. Thus, she was motivated to investigate human-AI collaborative tools to support usability and UX analysis. In a recent paper published at CHI 2023, Emily demonstrated what questions UX evaluators would ask conversational assistants and how they would like to interact with such an assistant. She also received seed funding from the AWARE-AI program, which supported compensation for participants in a project on finding ways for humans and AI to form productive and trustworthy partnerships.

In addition to her primary research topic, Emily collaborates with other students and professors on projects that address how to infuse accessibility in computing courses and how to make technology accessible for older adults.

Karthik Subramanian

Karthik Subramanian is working on his Ph.D. at the Rochester Institute of Technology under the guidance of Dr. Ferat Sahin. His area of research is Human-Robot Collaboration and Artificial Intelligence, specifically how machines and humans can team up effectively and efficiently.

This summer Karthik has been involved in an outreach program to expose middle and high school students to robotics and AI. He has recently published three research papers and will be presenting his work at the IEEE Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics in Hawaii in October 2023. The accepted papers are on the following topics:

1. Spatial and Temporal Attention-Based Emotion Estimation
2. Database for Human Emotion Estimation through Physiological Data in Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration
3. Evaluation of On-Robot Depth Sensors for Industrial Robotics

Karthik remains driven by a passion for pushing boundaries and fostering exciting solutions in robotics. He is currently serving on the organizing team of the IEEE SMC 2023 conference as web admin, a local organizing committee member, and a student volunteer.

When Karthik is not immersed in his studies, he spends time experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen, playing video games, or getting his adrenaline fix at autocross events – he is a bit of a car enthusiast. At home, he has a lively bunch of birds – two conures and a pair of cockatiels – adding cheerful chirps to his day.

Faculty Spotlights

Alexander G. Ororbia II, Department of Computer Science, Department of Psychology

Alex is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, affiliate professor in the Department of Psychology, and an affiliate faculty member of RIT's Center for Applied Neuroscience. He serves as senior personnel for the AWARE-AI program as well as mentor for both its AI software and cognitive models in AI tracks. In addition to being a co-founder of RIT's Cognitive Science program, Alex serves in the program's Joint Program Committee, acting as the liaison for the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. He received the Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science & Engineering at Bucknell University, minoring in Philosophy and Mathematics, in 2013, and his Ph.D. in Information Sciences & Technology at Penn State University, minoring in Social Data Analytics, in 2018.

Alex directs the Neural Adaptive Computing (NAC) Laboratory, which focuses on answering questions that span the domains of statistical learning, cognitive science, and computational neuroscience. NAC's core research topics include spiking neural networks, Bayesian brain theory, predictive coding, active inference, biomimetic credit assignment, cognitive control architectures, and neurorobotics.

Bing Yan, Department of Electrical and Microelectronic Engineering

Dr. Bing Yan is a faculty member of the Department of Electrical and Microelectronics Engineering. She started at RIT in the fall of 2019 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and co-leads the AI hardware track in the AWARE-AI program. Funded by NSF, DoE, ISO-New England, etc., her research focuses on operation optimization of smart power/energy systems and intelligent manufacturing systems. Her work has received a Best Paper Award Honorable Mention from IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, and a best Technical Committee Working Group Outstanding Technical Report Award from the IEEE Power and Energy Society.

Dr. Yan founded the Intelligent Lab of Power and Manufacturing (ILPM), which trains and mentors the next generation of engineers and researchers with a solid background in engineering disciplines, and also enthusiastically contributes to the multidisciplinary area of power and manufacturing systems. Current research topics include operation optimization of smart power and energy systems, grid integration of renewables (wind and solar), scheduling of intelligent manufacturing systems, formulation tightening, mixed integer linear programming optimization, integration of machine learning, and mathematical optimization.

News

AWARE-AI 2023 Winter Retreat

Alvitta Ottley stands during her presentation. Her slides, to the right of her, show a person with an arrow pointing to text. To the right of the slides is an ASL interpreter.

Photo: Winter retreat keynote delivered by Dr. Alvitta Ottley from Washington University in St. Louis.

The AWARE-AI program hosted its second annual winter retreat on January 17 - 20, 2023.

The retreat featured two distinguished plenary speakers. Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency of Carnegie Mellon University delivered a talk titled Towards Real-World Multimodal AI and Dr. Alvitta Ottley of Washington University in St. Louis delivered a talk titled Uniting Human and Machine Intelligence to Support Data Discovery and Decision-Making.

Richard DeMartino, with arms outstretched, faces the students who sit at tables and face away from the camera.

Photo: Trainees attend a session on entrepreneurship with Dr. Richard DeMartino.

Other technical and career-advancement professional development sessions included an Industry Research Panel with panelists from Microsoft, Apple, and MITRE, as well as a discussion on Communicating Science to the General Public, led by RIT’s Associate Vice President of University Communications Bob Finnerty. There were also technical tutorials on reinforcement learning and sampling methods for ecologically valid data collection, led by RIT faculty members Dr. Jamison Heard and Dr. Garreth Tigwell respectively, in addition to a discussion on Translating Research into Entrepreneurship facilitated by the Director of RIT’s Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Dr. Richard DeMartino. Other sessions included Academic-Industry Cooperation and International Collaborations and Careers, led by Dr. Mohit Gupta and Dr. Thomas Pederson of University West in Sweden, an informational session on Things to Know about Negotiation when Interviewing for an Academic Position, led by Dr. Stephanie Ludi of University of North Texas, and a workshop focused on building community in the AI field and effective intercultural communication, led by the Director of RIT’s Diversity Theatre, Tina Chapman DaCosta.

An ASL interpreter stands in front of a screen that shows a presenter (Brian Mac Namee) and their slide. The title of the slide shown says "Impact Highlights".

Photo: Irish collaborator Dr. Brian Mac Namee presenting via Zoom at the winter retreat.

Spotlight on Research Track: Cognitive Models in AI

Last year, in AWARE-AI’s first full cohort year, with a group of students participating in the cognitive models in AI research track, the track developed an experimental paradigm to study human temporal awareness in interactions with dynamic systems. Track members implemented an experimental program to allow for manipulations of several independent variables and measurement of multiple dependent variables for a series of experiments.

The track also conducted a pilot experiment, results of which have been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 2023 Human Factors and Ergonomic Society International Annual Meeting in October 2023.

For this academic year, additional new trainees have joined the track: Will Gebhardt (PhD in Computing and Information Sciences) and Raghunandan Ramadass and Rajat Sahay (MS in Data Science). The plan is to conduct two experiments, one building on the temporal awareness research paradigm and the other to test a biologically plausible model of memory and changes in memory in deep neural networks by matching the model predictions with human performance.

In addition, a visiting trainee from University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, Faithful Chiagoziem Onwuegbuche, joined the research track. He is studying human aspects of ransomware attacks to understand the behavior of both attackers and victims for improving the effectiveness of machine learning ransomware intrusion detection systems.

With the different foci in this year’s research projects undertaken in the track, the track members will also develop synergies between these research initiatives and ensure all trainees are involved across projects.

Spring 2023 MSI Visits

The AWARE-AI program sent four trainees to visit four different minority-serving institutions in the spring. Matthew Seita visited Gallaudet University, Arianna Giguere visited Bryn Mawr College, Justin Namba visited City College of New York at CUNY, and Margaret Gray visited California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Additionally, Arianna had an opportunity to meet with faculty at Haverford College, which is closely partnered with Bryn Mawr. During each visit, trainees met with faculty and administration, gave research talks, and had opportunities to interact with students and share about their work in AI and their experiences as graduate students.

We were fortunate to be able to coordinate these visits alongside each host institution, and to be able to match students with institutions that aligned with the trainees’ interests and experiences. AWARE-AI wishes to extend gratitude to Dr. Li Liu (CSUN), Dr. Yingli Tian (CCNY CUNY), Dr. Chris Murphy (Bryn Mawr), and Dr. Raja Kushalnagar (Gallaudet) for graciously hosting the trainees at their institutions.

Justin Namba stands in front of campus buildings at CUNY on a sunny day.

Photo: Justin Namba at CUNY.

Margaret Grey poses with faculty at CSUN in front of a sign that reads College of Engineering and Computer Science

Photo: Margaret Gray visited CSUN.

Arianna Giguere stands in front of flowering trees on the Bryn Mawr campus.

Photo: Arianna Giguere at Bryn Mawr.

Spotlight on Select Spring 2023 Events

Hackathon winners proudly hold up their yellow award certificates.

Photo: Hackathon award winners from the Spring 2023 (left to right): Arianna Giguere, Justin Namba, Matt Altobelli, Rajesh Titung, and Michael Peechatt.

AWARE-AI’s inaugural Trainee Council concluded their activities in May. Kudos to Arianna Giguere, Emily Kuang, Justin Namba, and Karthik Subramanian for a job well done!

Two new ethics and communication workshops were introduced: Personal and Collective Responsibility and Using Storytelling Techniques to Communicate STEM Research facilitated by Dr. Irina Mikhalevich and Dr. Ammina Kothari, respectively.

Drs. Ferat Sahin and Jamison Heard led a Spring 2023 hackathon competition that included physiological data collected from human-robot experiments. Human operators had rated themselves on surprise, anxiety, boredom and comfort. Based on these subjective self- evaluations vs. the physiological signals, teams competed in creating inference models. Teams tested their models on held-out individuals’ data, and were rated by the organizers on their results, presentation delivery, and solution quality, and awards were issued. In the Spring 2023 hackathon, nine AWARE-AI Trainees competed in groups of three.

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