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April 15, 2026
Apr. 24 Colloquium: "NLP at the Crossroads: Identity, Culture, and the Scientific Foundations of Meaning"
In this talk, I argue that NLP is experiencing an identity crisis: it is increasingly subsumed under machine learning (ML), optimizing for predictive performance while neglecting its core scientific objective—the study of language as a system of meaning embedded in dynamic social, cultural, and epistemic contexts. We need to move beyond benchmark Illusions and establish sciences of annotation, evaluation, and veracity that embrace pluralism coupled with responsible thinking.
February 11, 2026
Feb. 20 Colloquium: "Environmentally Sustainable AI: Challenges and Solutions"
In this talk, I’ll characterize the complex relationship between AI and the environment, as exemplified by LLMs. I’ll describe what we currently know about the positive and negative environmental impacts of LLMs, and identify some of the key challenges to understanding and shaping those impacts moving forward.
February 9, 2026
March 27 Colloquium: "Scaling over Space: Advancing the Model and Data Foundations of GeoAI"
This talk will discuss both the method and data foundations to scale AI models for large-scale geospatial applications and science questions, covering new frameworks for spatially-explicit learning, knowledge-guided learning, task-aligned pretraining, as well as new benchmark datasets and data generation methods.
February 9, 2026
March 6 Colloquium: "AI Tools to Model the Hidden Structure of Corpora"
Curating models is time-consuming, so I have developed AI tools to help scholars build models of the hidden structure of their digital archives. This talk features a lot of fine art and it is open to anyone interested in AI-enhanced scholarship in the arts and humanities.
January 23, 2026
Feb. 6 Colloquium: "Simulating Social Media Bot Personas with LLM-Augmented Agent-Based Models"
By unifying LLMs with agent-based modeling, this talk offers a forward-looking methodology for analyzing digital influence, testing intervention strategies, and understanding how automated bot agents can shape the cognitive terrain of online societies.
January 6, 2026
Jan. 9 Colloquium: "Towards Embodied Agents that See, Simulate, and Reason"
In this talk, I present a unified framework for building embodied agents that can see, simulate, and reason. I begin by introducing methods for learning world simulators from data, arguing that visual reasoning—like textual reasoning—benefits from step-by-step processing.
December 2, 2025
Dec. 5 Colloquium: "Uniting Engineering and Medicine: Improving Clinical Competence through Advanced Simulation Technology"
This talk will highlight over a decade of research at the intersection of industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, human-computer interaction, and medicine. It will showcase how a team of engineers and medical professionals are transforming the way we prepare and assess the clinical competence of medical residents through advances in simulation technology.
November 19, 2025
SCI Faculty Member Participating in $5 million NSF Grant to Improve Qubits and Address Quantum Workforce Development
Dr. Xulong Tang, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, is participating in a five-year $5 million NSF ExpandQISE Track 2 Grant. The project, titled “ExpandQISE: URI-PQI Collaboration - Application of Quantum Fundamentals to Advance Research and Workforce Development,” is led by the University of Rhode Island in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh.
October 22, 2025
Nov. 21 Colloquium: "Behind-the-Scenes of AI Safety in Language Models"
As large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini become increasingly integrated into research and operational workflows, a critical question arises: Can these systems be trusted to behave safely, predictably, and reliably under real-world conditions? This talk explores that question through recent findings, including our own, on how AI models behave when confronted with unexpected or adversarial inputs.
October 8, 2025
Nov. 7 Colloquium: "Mental Models at the Intersection of Learning and Human-Robot Interaction"
In this talk, I present a preliminary framework to integrate these two conceptualizations of a mental model. I then present insights from several examples of past work to illustrate and explore the potential of this framework to build theory, inform practices, and generate testable hypotheses in robot-assisted learning.
September 9, 2025
Sept. 12 Colloquium: Graduate Student Talks
CS PhD students have the opportunity to apply for a CS Travel Award, which grants students $600 in travel assistance when presenting research at a conference. Three CS Travel Award recipients will present their research at this Friday's colloquium. The student presenters and their talk titles are as follows.
April 14, 2025
CS Graduate Program Ranked Higher in 2025 U.S. News and World Report Graduate Program Lists
SCI's graduate computer science programs have been ranked #51, five spots higher than in 2024, on the Best Grad Schools rankings.
March 26, 2025
March 28 Colloquium: "Human-Centered Innovation in Surgical Environments"
In this talk, I’ll share stories and practical tips from my experience developing ARTEMIS, an augmented reality system for remote surgical guidance, and my current work at Medivis. We'll explore strategies to cut through complexity, improve collaboration, and create solutions that genuinely make a difference for healthcare providers and patients.
March 11, 2025
April 11 Colloquium: "Towards Trustworthy and Reliable Multimodal AI"
Multimodal AI systems are transforming how users interact with digital content. However, deploying these models in high-stakes settings requires ensuring both the trustworthiness of the information they process and generate, as well as the reliability of their learning and inference mechanisms. In this talk, I present approaches to addressing these challenges.
March 5, 2025
March 14 Colloquium: "Unlocking Data with Words: The Epic Journey of Natural Language Interfaces"
In this talk, we will explore the evolution of NLIDBs, from early research milestones to the latest neural-based innovations. We will delve into the challenges that still lie ahead and the exciting research opportunities that await the database community.