Welcome back to Science Fair, Bwog’s weekly roundup of science events happening around campus. As always, email science@bwog.com if you want your event featured.

Architectures, Chips, and Automation for the Specialization Era

• Monday, March 6, 11:40 am to 1 pm.
• Computer Science Building 451, CS Auditorium.
• “For nearly five decades, Moore’s Law offered the promise of exponentially increasing computer performance. In Moore’s own words, however, “no exponential is forever”. The past decade has witnessed the stagnation of general-purpose computer performance and the consequential rise of specialized processors to succeed them. While specialized processors offer order-of-magnitude performance and energy efficiency improvements over their general-purpose counterparts, incorporating these processors into a modern system-on-chip (SoC) incurs a dramatic increase in the expertise, time, and effort to implement the system. In this talk, I will present my work on addressing these barriers to modern SoC design and implementation. Specifically, I will present my work on (1) Celerity, a tiered accelerator fabric SoC fabricated in 16nm FinFET; (2) OpenROAD, a widely used open-source design automation platform; and (3) SpeEDAr, an acceleration framework for design automation algorithms.” More information here.

Interpretable and Controllable Language Models

• Monday, March 6, 4 to 5 pm.
• Computer Science Building 453, CS conference room.
• “Explaining and controlling the behavior of pretrained language models continues to be difficult, making language models unsafe for applications involving risk to humans. In this talk, I discuss what interpretability research can uniquely contribute to the effort of making LMs safer, and I connect work in interpretability to recent research on model “controllability” via supervising model reasoning and fine-grained editing of model behaviors. Experiments show that (1) though models can verbalize reasoning steps in natural language when solving a task, these explanations greatly decline in quality for harder data points; (2) supervising model explanations can significantly improve out-of-distribution generalization, but current “right for the right reason” metrics fail to distinguish better and worse models; and (3) while we would think that progress in interpretability would translate to better model editing techniques for controlling their behavior, this is surprisingly not always the case. Lastly, I outline two important areas for making LMs more interpretable and controllable, namely faithful natural language explanation and non-idealized belief revision.” More information here.

The Value of Public Health Engagement in Healthy Aging

• Tuesday, March 7, 11:30 am to 12:30 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “The U.S. public health sector has made significant contributions to the longevity of the U.S. population, and yet, as a whole, the U.S. public health system has not adopted an age-friendly approach to population health. Trust for America’s Health implemented the Age-Friendly Public Health Systems initiative to elevate healthy aging as a core public health function. This seminar will explore the initiative, from its inception to multi-state expansion, and examine the importance of collaboration across all sectors to support older adult health and well-being.” More information here.

Bodily Self and Interpersonal Relations in Schizophrenia

• Tuesday, March 7, 5:30 to 7 pm.
• Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, 1161 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, register here.
• “In spite of the historically consolidated psychopathological perspective, neuroscientific research applied to schizophrenia has so far almost entirely neglected the first-person experiential dimension of this syndrome, mainly focusing on higher- order cognitive functions, such as executive function, working memory, theory of mind, and the like… [The speaker] posits that brain function anomalies of multisensory integration, differential processing of self- and other-related bodily information mediating self-experience, might be at the basis of the deficits and imbalance in the pre-reflective relationship of the bodily self to the social world observed in schizophrenia.” More information here.

Building Individual, Societal and Digital Resilience: An interdisciplinary panel discussion

• Wednesday, March 8, 4 to 5 pm.
• Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd floor, Barnard Hall, register here.
• “We are facing unprecedented challenges in many facets of our lives – at the individual, societal, technical, and environmental levels. We have experienced severe disruptions that have forced us not only to find new, innovative approaches in our personal and professional lives, but also to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances and strengthen our resilience. Our distinguished panelists will explore resilience across domains and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and provide unique insights on how to build and foster resilience on multiple levels. Discussion will explore the intersectional commonalities and differences in approaches to resilience across domains including climate, cybersecurity, education, and public health.” More information here.

Exploring Difference in the Biology Classroom

• Wednesday, March 8, 6 to 7 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “In this session, disability scholars will provide an introduction to the evolution of disability language, discuss current trends, share insights from their work in clinical settings, and identify practices that can support inclusive education and engagement around disability and difference. The program will focus on evidence-based, pedagogical approaches that affirm the dignity, humanity, and agency of disabled and neurodiverse people and support them to learn, grow, and flourish.” More information here.

Reading and rewriting post-translational modifications in cells

• Thursday, March 9, 4:30 to 5:30 pm.
• Online (join here) or in-person (Havemeyer 209).
• “In this presentation, I will describe recent results from our lab demonstrating how changes in the primary coordination sphere are used to understand changes in reactivity and perturbations to the catalytic mechanism(s). Ongoing efforts to systematically modulate and quantify the impact of the secondary and outer coordination environments will be discussed. Reconstructing functional metalloenzymes ‘from the ground up’ offers direct insight into the fundamental chemical principles driving the natural systems.” More information here.

The Genie Is Out of the Bottle for Polygenic Screening of Embryos: Where To From Here?

• Friday, March 10, 12 to 1 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “A growing number of private companies are offering prospective parents using in-vitro fertilization polygenic screening of embryos to identify the risks for developing complex diseases later in life. Children have already been born from IVF cycles that integrated this screening. The use of polygenic risk reports for children and adults in clinical care raises unique questions about parental reproductive freedom as well as the forces and societal values that mobilize this practice. What is the validity of polygenic screening? Should polygenic screening of embryos become a standard offering as part of IVF, alongside currently common screens for aneuploidies? What are the risks? How should the conditions for which polygenic screening of embryos are offered be determined, and by what criteria? This ELSI Friday Forum explores the ELSI challenges of polygenic screening of embryos and stakeholders’ perspectives on this emerging practice. We will discuss its risks, limitations, and potential benefits for families and society at large.” More information here.

Circularity Day NYC 2023

• Friday, March 10, 1 to 4 pm.
• Barnard College: Diana Center Event Oval, register here.
• Barnard College is teaming up with Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, and the Columbia Climate School to host a city-wide celebration of the powerful sustainability practice known as circularity. Circularity Means: We Share, We Reuse, We Repair, and We Build a More Sustainable, Equitable, Resilient City. On March 10, 2023, we will celebrate Circularity Day NYC 2023 to highlight local circularity champions and announce new initiatives to identify and support New York’s small businesses, community organizations, and schools, leading the way to a more circular and equitable New York.” More information here.

Header image via Bwarchives