May 2023 - Sanghani-faculty - mailman.cs.vt.edu

Access to LLMs, Azure Credits
by Naren Ramakrishnan 26 May '23

26 May '23

Sanghani Colleagues, There are some (early) discussions happening with Microsoft + OpenAI to try to obtain access to LLMs, Azure credits, etc. Can you respond to me by June 1st with some examples of things that would make a big difference in your research? Thank you. Examples of details: - access to specific LLMs/toolkits/datasets (name names) - be specific in quantities - # tokens/machines/GPUs etc. - what you will do with Azure credits - training/inference? - what applications/interesting projects will you use this for? - what will Microsoft get in return? Will you use this in a course? Will your students help do beta-testing? Will people get trained in some of their APIs? etc. Have a great long weekend! Best, Naren

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Joyce - out of office
by Joyce Newberry 24 May '23

24 May '23

Good evening faculty, I will be out of the office tomorrow morning between 10a - 12noon. I will be available after 1p. Here's my leave schedule for the summer: May 31 (10a - 1p) June 19 (Juneteenth Holiday) July 5 - 14 (cruise vacation) August 11 (leave) August 17 and 18 (leave) As always, I will work with you to complete your requests in a timely manner. Thank you very much in advance. Regards, *Joyce I. Newberry, MBAGrant Administrator - Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics* Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech 900 North Glebe Road Arlington, VA 22203 Phone: (571) 858-3360 | joyce15(a)vt.edu PLEASE NOTE: I will be out of the office on the following days: May 25 (10a-12noon), May 31 (10a-1p) - medical appointments and Vacation (July 5 - July 14) *PLEASE NOTE:* OSP requires that you have all the administrative documents, including accepted and final budget, Approved routing status in Summit, and complete sponsor forms by 9:00 AM the *day before your proposal is due*. Please have your complete technical proposal ready to submit, no later than *9:00 AM the day the proposal is due or we cannot submit*. *Please see the OSP Procedure 20002 for more details on Proposal Submission*. https://osp.vt.edu/content/dam/osp_vt_edu/policies/osp20002.pdf

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61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23)
by wanah92＠vt.edu 24 May '23

24 May '23

I've invited you to fill out the following form: 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23) To fill it out, visit: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdnHmmDQ8eAVt5ZJB-Xk_J837Ngk16y-l5… I've invited you to fill out a form: 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23) Participation Google Forms: Create and analyze surveys.

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Invitation to AI for Pediatric and Rare Diseases Workshop, Jun 12
by Naren Ramakrishnan 22 May '23

22 May '23

Sanghani Colleagues, Hope your summer is off to a great start! The center is organizing a joint symposium with Childrens Hospital on June 12 on the topic of "AI for Pediatric and Rare Diseases' '. The goal is to foster and fund collaborations between VT faculty and Childrens researchers based on common interests. There are a lot of people at CNH who have interesting datasets and problems but need data mining/ML expertise. There is also some joint funding available for projects, details of which will be announced during the symposium. See more details at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-for-pediatric-health-and-rare-diseases-cnri… . We hope you will be able to attend. I think it will be a great opportunity to expand collaborations in areas of interest. Travel funding is available if you are coming from B'burg but pl let us know soon for planning purposes. Best, Naren

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ACL’23 Participation - Google Form
by Shalaby, Wanawsha 17 May '23

17 May '23

Good Afternoon Faculty and Students, We are now using Google Forms as a more efficient way of garnering information about your participation at major conferences and would greatly appreciate your input. This will help in our efforts to promote your work in Sanghani Center web stories and on our social media accounts. We have directly shared the Google Form with each of you but below is the link to the form in case you didn't receive the invitation directly. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pI2RxSXCoTxkGpGDlRUf0HsdsIOlote_F6DVkIVhZ4… Thank you very much for your help! Best, Wanawsha

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61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23)
by wanah92＠vt.edu 17 May '23

17 May '23

I've invited you to fill out the following form: 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23) To fill it out, visit: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdnHmmDQ8eAVt5ZJB-Xk_J837Ngk16y-l5… I've invited you to fill out a form: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23) Participation Google Forms: Create and analyze surveys.

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Invitation to MS thesis defense of Xiaochu Li - May 11, 2:30-4pm
by Lifu Huang 10 May '23

10 May '23

Good morning all, You are cordially invited to the MS thesis defense of Xiaochu Li. Title: Joint Biomedical Entity Linking and Event Extraction via Collaborative Learning Committee: Dr. Lifu Huang (Chair), Dr. Liqing Zhang, Dr. Chandan Reddy Abstract: Biomedical entity linking and event extraction are two crucial tasks to support text understanding and retrieval in the biomedical domain. These two tasks intrinsically benefit each other: entity linking disambiguates the biomedical concepts by referring to external knowledge bases and the domain knowledge further provides additional clues to understand and extract the biological processes, while event extraction identifies a key trigger and entities involved to describe each biological process which also captures the structural context to better disambiguate the biomedical entities. However, previous research typically solves these two tasks separately or in a pipeline, leading to error propagation. What's more, it's even more challenging to solve these two tasks together as there is no existing dataset that contains annotations for both tasks. To solve these challenges, we propose joint biomedical entity linking and event extraction by regarding the event structures and entity references in knowledge bases as latent variables and updating the two task-specific models in an iterative collaborative training framework: (1) predicting the missing variables for each partially annotated dataset based on the current two task-specific models; and (2) updating the parameters of each model on the corresponding pseudo completed dataset. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets: Genia 2011 for event extraction and BC4GO for entity linking, show that our joint framework significantly improves the model for each individual task and outperforms the strong baselines for both tasks. Date: Thursday, May 11, 2023 Time: 2:30pm - 4pm Location (Zoom): https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/5961845863 Best wishes, --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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CANCELED: Sanghani Center Faculty Meeting - May 5
by Shalaby, Wanawsha 01 May '23

01 May '23

Hi All, As the end of the semester approaches, we've decided to cancel our Sanghani Center faculty meeting scheduled for this Friday, May 5. Thanks, Wanawsha Wanawsha Shalaby Manager of Operations UrbComp Program Coordinator Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics - Virginia Tech 900 N. Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22203 Phone: (571) 858-3361 E-Mail: wanah92(a)vt.edu<mailto:wanah92@vt.edu>

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