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.

Weak Lensing Non-Gaussian Statistics in the era of precision Cosmology

• Monday, April 3, 2:10 to 3 pm.
• Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall 8th Floor).
• “During this seminar, I will discuss the current state-of-the-art in weak lensing non-Gaussian analyses. I will show the constraints on cosmological parameters from two independent analyses using non-Gaussian statistics applied to the first three years of data (Y3) of the Dark Energy Survey (DES): moments and peaks. I will further describe promising techniques that are soon to be applied to data (wavelet-based methods) and discuss the main challenges ahead in view of stage IV surveys.” More information here.

Prompting for Conversation Synthesis in Low-Resource Conversational Tasks

• Monday, April 3, 4 to 5 pm.
• 453 Computer Science Building.
• “In this talk, we present two parallel lines of work in leveraging prompting for conversation synthesis. In the first line of work, we leverage prompting to augment existing conversational datasets. We propose WeakDAP, a framework which adds weakly supervised filtering into the augmentation pipeline as a solution to the largely uncontrolled nature of prompting. WeakDAP surpasses state-of-the-art performance in the emotion classification task on DailyDialog despite using only 10% of the ground truth data. In the second line of work, we examine large language [models’] potential to synthesize entire conversational datasets from scratch. Rather than augmenting existing conversational datasets, we demonstrate a process called PLACES which uses a small pool of expert-written in-context examples to guide language models towards generating coherent synthetic conversations. We find that our synthetic data is able to either match or outperform human-human conversational data, and can be used to supplement understudied contexts such as multi-party conversation.” More information here.

National Public Health Week Community Panel Discussion

• Tuesday, April 4, 11:30 am to 12:30 pm.
• Online and in-person, Allan Rosenfield Building Room 532 (register for both here).
• “The panel discussion will feature local community leaders. The conversation will delve into the resources needed to foster and sustain true academic-community partnerships that reduce disparities and foster wellbeing in Northern Manhattan and beyond.” More information here.

Modern high-order integral equation methods for electromagnetic scattering

• Tuesday, April 4, 2:45 to 3:45 pm.
• 214 Mudd Hall.
• “Solving Maxwell’s equations governing electromagnetic wave propagation in non-trivial geometries is not merely a numerical or scientific computing matter: the equations “see” the connectedness of the geometry and can be quite sensitive to the driving frequency in the time-harmonic case. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the ways in which “standard” approaches for solving electromagnetic scattering problems breakdown, as well as a suite of modern integral equation approaches that provide remedies. The solution to these integral equations can be accelerated via use of an FMM, and the benefits of high-order solvers over low-order ones will be demonstrated via several numerical examples.” More information here.

What Would Be A Just Energy Transition?

• Tuesday, April 4, 4 to 6 pm.
• Online (register here) and in-person, Faculty House.
• “Stephanie Pincetl discusses how cities impact resources far and near such as water sources and ecosystems, and how those resources are used in cities, where, by whom, and to do what. She focuses on quantifying those flows, including urban generated wastes like greenhouse gases, and how institutions, regulations and rules shape the ways the flows are appropriated, and how cities are built (including infrastructures) and organized.” More information here.

Systems Biology Initiative Spring 2023 Expo

• Wednesday, April 5, 5 to 6:30 pm.
• 569 Lerner, register here.
• “Interested in systems biology, computational biology, or biomedical engineering? Interested in participating in research in these fields? The Systems Biology Initiative is hosting a Computational Biology Expo on Wednesday, April 5th at Lerner 569. We will be hosting a Computational Biology Expo from 5:00 to 6:30 PM and Dr. Mohammed AlQuraishi and Dr. David Knowles from Columbia’s Department of Systems Biology. They will give presentations in the machine learning, structural biology, and genomics fields. These researchers are leading their respective fields, so this is a great opportunity to learn about the frontiers of these fields and ask them questions during Q&A.”

Enabling Self-sufficient Robot Learning

• Thursday, April 6, 11:30 am to 1 pm.
• 236A Mudd Hall.
• “Autonomous exploration and data-efficient learning are important ingredients for helping machine learning handle the complexity and variety of real-world interactions. In this talk, I will describe methods that provide these ingredients and serve as building blocks for enabling self-sufficient robot learning… This research direction involves formalizing and learning novel distance metrics on this space and will support principled ways of seeking diverse behaviors. This can unlock truly autonomous learning, where learning agents have incentives to explore, build useful internal representations and discover a variety of effective ways of interacting with the world.” More information here.

Exploring Mars with Perseverance and ingenuity

• Thursday, April 6, 3 to 5 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “In the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, workers finally received the signal that the capsule containing Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter had touched the top of the atmosphere of Mars. But, due to the light travel time of over 10 minutes, the rover was on the surface of Mars either completely intact or completely disassembled. The final decisions on where the rover well actually sat down were made by the rover itself using artificial intelligence (AI) software. AI is NASA’s way of improvisation. Making decisions quickly and deviating from an existing plan is rarely what NASA does, but there are some instances in which this approach is essential for mission success… This workshop will give you the chance to interact with a key architect of the mission and delve into the ways in which NASA utilized artificial intelligence and sounds to enable its rovers to traverse and thrive on the surface of Mars.” More information here.

Trinity: Self-consistent dark matter halo–galaxy–supermassive black hole connection from z=0-10, and predictions on high-z quasars in the JWST era

• Thursday, April 6, 4:05 to 4:35 pm.
• Pupin 1402.
• “We present TRINITY, a flexible empirical model that self-consistently infers the statistical connection between dark matter haloes, galaxies, and supermassive black holes (SMBHs). TRINITY is constrained by galaxy observables from 0 < z < 10 and SMBH observables from 0 < z < 6.5. The model includes full treatment of observational systematics (e.g., AGN obscuration and errors in stellar masses). From these data, TRINITY infers the average SMBH mass, SMBH accretion rate, merger rate, and Eddington ratio distribution as functions of halo mass, galaxy stellar mass, and redshift. Key findings include: 1) the normalization and the slope of the SMBH mass–bulge mass relation increases mildly from z = 0 to z = 10; 2) The apparent overmassive SMBHs at z~6 can be explained by selection bias in flux limited surveys. Trinity also predicts the quasar luminosity functions as a function of host galaxy mass and redshift, which will enable more accurate high-z galaxy property measurements in the JWST era.” More information here.

Worlds at Waste: The Crisis of Water in the Subcontinent

• Friday, April 7, 10:30 am to 4:30 pm.
• Buell Hall (register here).
• “The focus of this day-long workshop, “Worlds at Waste: Water,” is to reflect on recent climate events that have caused massive displacement in southern Pakistan, southwest India, and Bangladesh. It aims to bring together scientists and social scientists to help look through the lens of historical pasts, politics, and embedded presents. Devastation and displacement from water caused by the climate crisis are and will remain a recurring, returning, and pervasive phenomenon in the global south. This approach intends to shift away from the focus on modeling catastrophic futures, the periodization of eras, and mapping the implications of climate change that prevail in current dialogues on climate change. Rather, the workshop guides towards a conversation that foregrounds human and environmental vulnerability in non-Western, transnational spaces with Indigenous and historical means of resilience. The intention is to continue this series with a focus on Air and Land in the following academic year.” More information here.

‘Subconcussive’ Head Injuries – A Decade at the Interface of Sport, Engineering and Medicine

• Friday, April 7, 11 am to 12 pm.
• Online (register here) or in-person, 501 Schermerhorn.
• “For the past decade, our pioneering efforts have documented a wide range of potentially adverse health effects associated with head acceleration events (HAEs) without clinical diagnosis of a concussion. Individuals experiencing so-called “subconcussive” HAEs do not elicit easily identifiable symptoms and continue participation. Therefore, they are expected to be at a greater risk for further injury. Multiple neuroimaging studies suggest several types of neurologic changes, including inflammation, are associated with subconcussive HAE exposure and could produce lasting changes to the brain. Given the frequency at which such changes have been observed in high school athletes—a large and vulnerable population—prevention is critical. This talk will explore the history of this work, and explore how the field may transition effectively from damage characterization to the development of models that address the more pertinent concerns of why this damage accrues, who is at greatest risk, and how to mitigate these risks.” More information here.

CSC Workshop: Visualising the Universe

• Friday, April 7, 12 to 2 pm.
• Online and in-person, 516 Milstein (register for both here).
• “From planets to stars to galaxies and galaxy clusters to the filamentary structure of the entire Universe, the topics in astronomy span an incredible range. And a tremendous amount of this data lives available online! In this workshop, we will review the largest online archives of astrophysical simulations and observations, learn about the science behind them, and produce some beautiful visualisations and movies in Python that should be equally at home in your academic work, museums, or art galleries.” More information here.

Emerging nanophotonic platforms for personal and population health

• Friday, April 7, 2 to 3:30 pm.
• Online (Zoom link here) or in-person, 209 Havemeyer.
• “We present our efforts to develop photonic sensors suitable for field-deployment that enable early disease onset, help inform optimal treatment, and uncover new biological pathways associated with personal, population, and ecosystem-level health… By combining metasurface design with acoustic bioprinting for functionalization, we develop chips that detect gene fragments, proteins, and metabolites on the same platform. We discuss integration of these sensors with workflows in Stanford’s Clinical Virology Laboratory, as well as with autonomous underwater robots from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for real-time phytoplankton detection.” More information here.

Header image via author