AI Seminar sponsored by Fortive

Devi Parikh -- Multi-modality, Creativity, and Climate Change

Abstract: In this talk I will talk about three directions I am currently excited about:

(1) Multi-modal AI: I will describe some of our recent work on training models for multi-modal (vision and language) data. In particular, I will describe our work on training a single transformer-based model that can perform 12 different tasks. Given an image and a question, it can answer the question. Given an image and a caption, it can score their relevance. Given an image and a phrase, it can identify the image region that matches the phrase. And so on. I will show a demo of this model vilbert.cloudcv.org. For anyone interested in multimodal AI, check out this open-source multimodal-framework https://github.com/facebookresearch/mmf.

(2) AI assisted human-creativity: I will then talk about some of our initial work in seeing how AI can inspire human creativity in the context of thematic typography, dance movements, sketches, and generative art. I will also talk about some of our work on generating a visual abstraction that summarizes how your day was.

(3) AI to model and discover new catalysts: Finally, I will talk about our recently announced Open Catalyst Project on using AI to model and discover new catalysts to address the energy challenges posed by climate change. I will provide a brief overview of the domain and problem definition, introduce the large Open Catalyst Dataset we have collected and made publicly available, and benchmark a few existing graph neural network models. Find out more about the project here: https://opencatalystproject.org/.

Bio: Devi Parikh is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, and a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR).

From 2013 to 2016, she was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. From 2009 to 2012, she was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an academic computer science institute affiliated with University of Chicago. She has held visiting positions at Cornell University, University of Texas at Austin, Microsoft Research, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Facebook AI Research. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2009 respectively. She received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rowan University in 2005.

Her research interests are in computer vision, natural language processing, embodied AI, human-AI collaboration, and AI for creativity.

She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, an IJCAI Computers and Thought award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, an Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, a Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award at Georgia Tech, an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award in Artificial Intelligence from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, four Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Academic Research Award, a Lockheed Martin Inspirational Young Faculty Award at Georgia Tech, an Outstanding New Assistant Professor award from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, a Rowan University Medal of Excellence for Alumni Achievement, Rowan University's 40 under 40 recognition, a Forbes' list of 20 "Incredible Women Advancing A.I. Research" recognition, and a Marr Best Paper Prize awarded at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).

https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~parikh.