Week 9 Activity: Colloquium talk at Mudd
This week, Harvey Mudd College hosts a talk by Tahiya Chowdhury, from Colby College. Dr. Chowdhury is a candidate for a faculty position in the CS department at the college. The talk begins at 4:15 PM on Thursday, but a reception with refreshments will be held outside at 4:00 PM.
For students enrolled in CS Colloquium (CS 195):
- If you’re in Section 1, we expect you to attend the event when it occurs (synchronously).
- If you’re in Section 2, we hope to record the event and post it for you to watch asynchronously.
Multimodal Interaction for Understanding Human and Environment
Abstract
Images are capable of capturing our visual world. Combined with other information modalities such as language, speech, and spatial data, they can show how our conversational contexts influence our non-verbal behavior, the changes our natural landscape (ocean, islands) undergo over time, and how we can use such insights in decision-making at an individual level and policy-making at the community level.
In this talk, I will highlight two main directions I am pursuing with multimodal information: to model social communication and to sense climate impact on our environment. Drawing upon my research on autism diagnostic conversations, I will explain how I use artificial intelligence and other computational tools to explore verbal and nonverbal cues during conversations and how conversation context influences their usage. I will then share some of my ongoing projects where we have developed automated systems using multimodal information to sense the shifts in our environment from large-scale data. I will conclude by discussing my future research plans to develop user-centered tools and improve human-AI collaboration for interdisciplinary research applications.
About Tahiya Chowdhury
Tahiya Chowdhury is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a visiting faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at Colby College. Her past degrees include a Master of Science in Computer Engineering with a focus on usable security and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, both from Rutgers University. During her Ph.D., she was a member of the Cyber-Physical Intelligence Lab (CyPhILab) and Wireless Information Networking Lab at Rutgers, where she worked on designing data-driven intelligent tools to model human events on individual and city-scale smart environments. Her current research focuses on human-centered, public-interest technology with artificial intelligence. She uses computational tools to understand human behaviors and social communication from multimodal conversations. She also collaborates closely with academic faculty, students, and local stakeholders in interdisciplinary research projects to study human and climate impact on our environment.
When and How to Attend
- Thursday, October 26
- Location: Galileo McAlister, Harvey Mudd College
- Optional reception begins at 4:00 PM
- Talk runs from 4:15–5:30 PM
Recording for Section 2
(You must be logged in to view this video.)
This video is provided for students in Section 2 of CS 195 (and students in Section 1 who had to miss the talk due to extenuating circumstances). This is a private video, so please do not share it with others.
(Unfortunately, due to an error the question period is not fully captured in the video.)
Required Assessment
To receive credit for attending this colloquium, complete the assessment:
Please do so at your soonest convenience, within 24 hours of seeing the talk.
(When logged in, completion status appears here.)