Fall 2021 Schedule
3:00 pm Central Time, EIT Building Room 217
Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/53fe97b20e1941848042ba07c1f93b13
| Date | Dept | Name of the Speaker | Title of the Talk | Host |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8/27 | IFSC | Dr. Liz Pierce | Our first session will provide a preview of this semester’s colloquium series as well as introducing some new online advising materials for graduate students. | Dr. John Talburt |
| 9/3 | IFSC | Dr. Nitin Agarwal | Student researchers under the direction of Dr. Nitin Agarwal from the Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) will be presenting their current projects. | Dr. Liz Pierce |
| 9/10 | CPSC | Dr. Miaoqing Huang | Dr. Miaoqing Huang is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Dr. Huang is the recipient of two recent NSF Awards involving Machine Learning on the Edge for Real-Time Microsecond State Estimation of High-Rate Dynamic Events as well as his work in engaging doctoral students in autonomic and self-organizing computing systems research. For his talk today, Dr. Huang will be presenting his research on “Programmable Hardware Accelerators for Neural Networks on FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). | Dr. Al Baker |
| 9/17 | RHET | Dr. Karen Kuralt | Dr. Kuralt, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing will be talking about “How to Write a Dissertation”. Be sure to bring your questions about structure, voice, formatting, style, and other writing topics to this special session to find out the in’s and out’s of writing a good dissertation. | Dr. Liz Pierce |
| 9/24 | IFSC | Dr. Suman Mitra | Dr. Suman Mitra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He will be talking about his NSF research project regarding Shared Microbility for Affordable-Accessible Housing (SMILIES): a community-engaged pilot project to improve the accessibility to jobs and essential activities for affordable housing communities in small- and mid-sized cities and rural areas by leveraging the explosive growth of shared micromobility (SMM) services. | Dr. Liz Pierce |
| 10/1 | IFSC | Dr. Liza Fazio | Dr. Lisa Fazio is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Fazio studies how people learn new information, both true and false, and how to correct errors in people’s knowledge. This includes how to mitigate the effects of reading false information and how to increase classroom learning. Her research informs basic theories about learning and memory, while also having clear applications for practitioners, such as journalists and teachers. | Dr. Liz Pierce |
| 10/8 | INFQ | Dr. Laura Sebastian Coleman | Data literacy has become something of a buzz word recently and there is a bit of urgency around the idea of helping organizations and individuals become “data literate”. But there are not yet reliable models of data literacy. Because of this there is some risk that the concept will get hijacked by vendors trying to sell tools that raise data literacy. Dr. Coleman would like to discuss the terminology around data literacy, how data literacy relates to general literacy, and what it would take to develop useful models through which to promote and measure data literacy. | Dr. John Talburt |
| 10/15 | SYEN | Dr. Ashokkumar M Sharma, Assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Technology at UA Little Rock |
Water scarcity is one of the growing concerns in today’s world. Communities that reside in remote areas or at higher altitudes may encounter water scarcity due to lack of water transport infrastructure affecting drinking, sanitation, farming, and other water-based needs. These issues can be effectively solved by employing a hydraulic ram pump, which does not require electricity to function. Hydraulic ram pumps are powered by the water-head available between the source and the pump unit resulting in a negligible operational cost. This talk will cover recent research and development work on a hydraulic ram pump system to improve its overall performance. | Dr. Shrikanth Pidugu |
| 10/22 | INFQ | Robert Seiner | Robert Seiner will be speaking at our CSTEM Doctoral Colloquium about approaches to data governance and all students are welcome to attend. Besides his consulting (https://kikconsulting.com/) and education businesses, he is now an Adjunct Faculty member with Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. He is presently involved in their initial post-graduate CDataO and Data-Driven Leadership CDO (with the US Army) certification cohorts and they are planning on having Robert Seiner lecture and teach a module or two soon. | Dr. Liz Pierce |
| 10/29 | CPSC | Dr. Ivan Conde | Dr. Conde will be talking about on-device object detection for more efficient and privacy-compliant visual perception in context-aware systems. Ambient intelligence (AmI) encompasses technological infrastructures capable of sensing data from the environments and extracting high-level knowledge to detect or recognize users’ features and actions as well as entities or events in their surroundings. Visual perception, particularly object detection, has become one of the most relevant enabling factors for this context-aware user-centered intelligence, being the cornerstone of relevant but complex tasks such as object tracking or human action recognition. In this context, convolutional neural networks have proven to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy levels. However, they typically result in large and highly complex models that typically demand computation offloading on remote cloud platforms. Such an approach has security- and latency-related limitations and may not be appropriate for some AmI use cases where system response time must be as short as possible, and data privacy must be guaranteed. In the last few years, the on-device paradigm has emerged in response to those limitations, yielding more compact and efficient neural networks able to address inference directly on client machines, thus providing users with a smoother and better-tailored experience, with no need of sharing their data with an outsourced service. Framed in that novel paradigm, this presentation will review the recent advances made along those lines in object detection, providing a comprehensive study of the most relevant lightweight CNN-based detection frameworks, discussing the most paradigmatic AmI domains where such approach has been successfully applied, the different challenges arisen, and the key strategies and techniques adopted to create vision solutions for image-based object classification and localization | Dr. Al Baker |
| 11/5 | INFQ | Dr. Josh McGee | The Arkansas Department of Transformation and Shared Services recently named Josh McGee the state’s chief data officer. McGee, the associate director of the Office for Education Policy in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas, will lead the state’s effort to bring disparate data together and put it to use to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state government. Prior to joining the U of A, McGee was an executive vice president with the Arnold Foundation in Houston where he led a team that invested $50 million in data-driven efforts to improve public policy in six states and Washington, D.C. The strategy paired state governments with dedicated university partners who integrated administrative data and deployed research to help policymakers address persistent challenges. These “Policy Labs” redirected more than $150 million in taxpayer resources toward more effective uses. | Dr. Liz Pierce |
| 11/12 | IFSC | Mr. Chao Yan | Mr. Chao Yan is a CS PhD Candidate at Vanderbilt University. He has been involved in several interesting projects including the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and network analysis to study teamwork in intensive care units at Vanderbilt University Medical Center during the recent COVID crisis and using generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate “electronic health records” of patients who do not exist. | Dr. Liz Pierce |
| 11/19 | CPSC | Dr. Philip Huff | Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity | Dr. Al Baker |
| 11/26 | None | None | No seminar this week. Enjoy the Thanksgiving Weekend! | None |
| 12/3 | CPSC | Dr. Jan Springer | Dr. Springer will be sharing with students the research opportunities, projects, and activities of the UA Little Rock’s Emerging Analytics Center. | Dr. Al Baker |
