News

May 11, 2023

Announcing the Spring 2023 Best Capstone Talk Award Winners

The Department of Computer Science gives out awards to the three best presenters for the CS 1900 and CS 1950 capstone courses each semester. The awardees are selected based on peer reviews within...

May 9, 2023

Computer Science Celebrates 2023 Graduates

May 9, 2023

The Class of 2023 from the School of Computing and Information (SCI)’s Department of Computer Science celebrated their accomplishments and looked towards the...

April 21, 2023

CS Student Zhen Wu Receives the 2022-2023 Computer Science Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award

Undergraduate Computer Science student Zhen Wu received the...

March 22, 2023

April 7 Colloquium: "User Control in Adaptive Information Access"

Combining the decision power or AI with the ability of the user to guide and control it brings together the strong sides of artificial and human intelligence and could lead to better results. In this talk, I will review the work of our team and the broader research community focused on adding various kinds of user control to adaptive information access systems and discuss lessons learned, prospects, and challenges of this direction of research.

March 5, 2023

April 21 Colloquium: "Towards Inclusive and Equitable Human Language Technologies"

I present three of our recent works: 1) Discourse-aware generation models for automatic social media moderation and mediation, 2) Sign language processing, and 3) Equitable and human-like dialogue generation models based on learning theory. Finally, I describe my research vision: Building inclusive and collaborative communicative systems and grounded artificial intelligence models by leveraging the cognitive science of language use alongside formal methods of machine learning.

January 20, 2023

February 24 Colloquium: "The Curious Case of Carbon efficiency in Sustainable Systems"

While current research has mostly focused on reducing the energy footprint, in this talk, we will discuss how improving energy efficiency does not translate to the goal of zero emissions. More importantly, carbon efficiency can be optimized independently of energy efficiency. Toward this end, I will present some examples of mitigating emissions and some directions toward designing carbon-efficient infrastructures. 

January 20, 2023

February 3 Colloquium: "Probabilistic Commonsense Knowledge in Language"

This talk will introduce a probabilistic model representing commonsense knowledge using a learned latent space of geometric embeddings -- probabilistic box embeddings. Using box embeddings makes it possible to handle commonsense queries with intersections, unions, and negations in a way similar to Venn diagram reasoning. Meanwhile, existing evaluations do not reflect the probabilistic nature of commonsense knowledge. To fill in the gap, I will discuss a method of retrieving commonsense related question answer distributions from human annotators and a novel method of generative evaluation. 

January 5, 2023

January 27 Colloquium: "Visualization of the Geometry and Dynamics of Hidden Unit Space"

The juxtaposition of pattern representations is reconfigured at each layer of a multi-layered perceptron. As the activity propagates through the network, the representations are transformed through a systematic progression such that the representation at the penultimate layer is computable at the final stage (e.g., linearly separability for a classification task). 

January 5, 2023

January 20 Colloquium: "Edge-based Real-Time Object Detection for Autonomous Driving"

 In this talk, I will share our recent study on developing a deep-learning-based object detection system on a field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) platform for driving applications.

October 25, 2022

October 28 Colloquium: "Great Stories in Computer Science: the case for complexity analysis and empirical testing"

As an instructor of introductory programming courses (007,401 445, 449) at Pitt and similar courses other universities Prof. Hoffman has consistently encountered math hesitancy to the presentation of complexity analysis. In this talk, he will convey an anecdote - a fascinating story in computer science surrounding the binary search algorithm. 

October 21, 2022

CS Graduate Students, Faculty Win Best Paper Award at the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

Computer Science Graduate Students Yue Dai, Meiqi Guo, and Zhexiong Liu, as well as Dr. Diane Litman, a professor in the Department of...

Victoria Chuah
September 22, 2022

Crowning achievements: CS Alumna Victoria Chuah on her multifaceted SCI experience

Ms. Victoria Chuah graduated with a BS+MS degree in Computer Science in May 2022 and was crowned Miss Virginia in June 2022. Read the interview to find out about her experience at Pitt and her plans for the future.

September 13, 2022

Computer Science undergraduate program jumped six spots in the latest US News & World Report ranking

Our undergraduate computer science program jumped six spots in the latest US News & World Report Best College rankings. 

Dr. James Morris
September 9, 2022

September 9 colloquium: Thoughts of a Reformed Computer Scientist: On the Nature of Real and Artificial Intelligence -- James Morris

On September 9th, we are hosting a joint Computer Science Colloquium / Research, Ethics and Society Initiative Seminar, entitled Thoughts of a Reformed Computer Scientist: On the Nature of Real and Artificial Intelligence, given by Dr. James Morris, MBA, PhD (Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University).

June 29, 2022

Dr. Diane Litman and collaborators from the LRDC win Future Forums on Learning's Learning Engineering Tools Competition

The Future Forums on Learning awarded Dr. Diane Litman and collaborators from the Learning Research and Development Center, Lindsay Clare Matsumura and Richard Correnti, a Catalyst Prize as part of their 2021-2022 Learning Tools Competition.