Mathematician works to improve artificial intelligence

Emory mathematician Lars Ruthotto is pioneering a new field that applies the logic of differential equations to refine the chaos of deep learning. (Emory Photo/Video)

By April Hunt
Emory Report

 If you’ve ever told Siri to call your friend Bob and she answers with, “Calling cops,” you’ve seen the instability of artificial intelligence (AI) in action.

Those mistakes are the limitation of the AI technology known as deep learning. They arise from the design of the deep neural network, as well as the network’s “training,” which applies mathematical optimization methods to massive amounts of data rather than hand-crafting rules to accomplish a specific task.

Emory mathematician Lars Ruthotto has dedicated his research to modeling and solving such 21st century problems with the innovative use of differential equations that date back to the late 1600s. The National Science Foundation has rewarded his efforts with a CAREER Award, its most prestigious honor for junior faculty.

Put simply, Ruthotto is pioneering a new field — combining applied math, engineering and computer science — that applies the logic of differential equations to refine the chaos of deep learning.

“Focusing on this research question can impact specific areas of deep learning now as well as emerging technology,” says Ruthotto, an assistant professor in mathematics and computer science. “It’s uncharted territory, and my students and I will be at the forefront exploring it.”

The award is recognition of the new knowledge Ruthotto and his students are creating in the emerging field and also a hint of what’s to come, says Vaidy Sunderam, chair of Emory's Department of Math and Computer Science.

 “This grant establishes Emory as a research and education pioneer in innovative methods for robust deep learning, a key technology in the coming AI decade,” Sunderam says.

Read more in Emory Report.

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Emory team vies for best social bot via Amazon's Alexa Prize

Faculty advisor Eugene Agichtein (far right) with the Mathematics and Computer Science Alexa Prize team (clockwise from top left): Ali Ahmadvand, Mingyang Sun, Jason Choi, Sergey Volokhin, Zihao Wang and Harshita Sahijwani. (Photo by Ann Borden, Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

“Alexa, when will you learn to chat with me like people I might meet at a party or a pub?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Alexa may be a popular talking bot, but she has not yet acquired the “social” skills to turn that query into a conversation.

A team of Emory students from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science are trying to help her develop those skills sooner, rather than later. They are among eight university teams selected from around the world to create a social bot and compete for this year’s Alexa Prize. Amazon is sponsoring the $3.5 million university challenge in order to advance the conversational capabilities of bots such as Alexa — Amazon’s “personal assistant” software that responds to voice commands through a growing list of devices.

“Conversational AI is one of the most difficult problems in the field of artificial intelligence,” says Zihao Wang, a graduate student and the leader of the Emory team. “Human language is so rich. We use combinations of words to form different expressions and idioms. It’s difficult to represent them in computer language.”

Wang’s teammates include Ali Ahmadvand, Jason Choi, Harshita Sahijwani and Sergey Volokhin — all graduate students — and senior Mingyang Sun. The team’s faculty advisor is Eugene Agichtein, an associate professor of Mathematics and Computer Science.

Each of the university teams received a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, and other tools, data and support from Amazon. A $500,000 prize will be given next November to the team that creates the best social bot, while second- and third-place teams will receive $100,000 and $50,000.

Additionally, a $1 million research grant will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their social bot achieves the grand challenge — conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes with a user rating of 4.0 or higher.

“The contest is a wonderful way for students to get hands-on experience developing a social bot using state-of-the-art technology,” Agichtein says. “Their work will be tested out by millions of real-world consumers through Amazon. And Amazon provides support and training so they can get experience with data and computing environments that are usually only accessible to those within major corporations.”

Agichtein’s IR Lab is developing new techniques for intelligent information access, including Web search and automated question answering. Conversational search capabilities are a key emerging trend, he says.

He notes that his children love asking Alexa trivia questions or about music and sports. “It’s natural for them to talk to devices instead of having to type in a question because they’re growing up amid this technology,” Agichtein says. “And as time goes on, it’s clear that voice-based communication devices are going to keep improving and become more ubiquitous.”

Wang is a native of China who earned his master’s in civil engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. A robotics project sparked his interest in information retrieval powered by machine learning, leading him to Emory and Agichtein’s lab to work on his PhD.

“Machine learning is widely applied in the real world,” Wang says. “It’s changing peoples’ lives in every way.”

Autonomous vehicles, drones, online shopping mechanisms and robots designed to detect and remove dangerous objects are just a few examples of how machine learning is being applied.

 “The idea is to train an algorithm to ‘learn’ patterns embedded in data,” Wang explains.

While a machine learning algorithm to simulate natural, human conversation is a difficult challenge, Wang says it’s one well worth pursuing.

Possible healthcare uses for conversational social bots include providing companionship to isolated seniors, serving as therapeutic agents for people suffering from depression and conducting patient interviews to streamline admissions to a medical clinic.

Wang also led an Emory team in the inaugural Alexa contest last year, but the team did not make it to the finals. “We learned a lot from the experience,” he says.

The working title for the Emory social bot this year is IRIS, which stands for information retrieval and informative suggestion agent. “Our focus will be on the accuracy and usefulness of information that we provide to users,” Wang says. “And we will add conversational functionality to our design to make the responses as natural and engaging as possible.”

IRIS will incorporate “ideas from each member of the team,” he adds. “That’s one of the most fun things about the contest, is working as a team.”

Starting in May, the public can access competing bots to provide feedback and rate them by saying, “Alexa, lets chat,” to an Echo device, or to the Amazon mobile app. The bots will be randomly assigned and remain anonymous, so that people providing feedback cannot identify the university that generated them.

By August, Amazon will have used this feedback to winnow the contestants down to three finalists that will continue to get more consumer feedback until the winner is announced in November.

Other university teams competing this year include: Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, Czech Technical University in Prague, Brigham Young University, UC Davis, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, UC Santa Cruz, and Carnegie Mellon.

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Ecosystems hanging by a thread

Emory disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie served on an international committee that developed best practice guidelines for health monitoring and disease control in great ape populations, part of a growing public education effort.

By Tony Rehagen
Emory Magazine

Thomas Gillespie’s parents and teachers always wanted him to go into medicine.

“Growing up in Rockford, Illinois, if you were smart and interested in biology, you were supposed to be a doctor,” he says.

Gillespie, meanwhile, was always more interested in primates. In seventh grade, he phoned animal psychologist Penny Patterson, famous for teaching the gorilla Koko how to use sign language, and interviewed the scientist about Koko’s diet while punching out notes on a typewriter. He was premed at the University of Illinois, but spent his internship at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, working in the “Tropic World” primate exhibit. His favorite undergrad course was biological anthropology, the study of biological and behavioral aspects of humans and nonhuman primates, looking at our closest relatives to better understand ourselves.

Gillespie eventually took a year off before graduate school to work with primate communities in the Peruvian Amazon. The apes finally won out — Gillespie would choose a doctorate in zoology over medical school.

But it wasn’t long before the two fields of study collided. While monitoring the group behavior of colobine monkeys in Africa, Gillespie observed that some of the animals were eating bark from the African cherry tree — not a typical food source for them. When he dug deeper, Gillespie learned that human doctors in the region used that same bark to treat parasites in their patients. The monkeys, he realized, were self-medicating.

“That discovery in these monkeys brought me back toward the health science side of biology,” says Gillespie.

Gillespie’s return to a medical approach to zoology came not a moment too soon—for the sake of the primates and maybe even all of humankind. As an associate professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences specializing in the disease ecology of primates, Gillespie and his team of researchers have helped uncover a crisis among our nearest taxonomic neighbors. According to an article coauthored by Gillespie and thirty other experts and published in the journal Science Advances, 75 percent of the world’s five-hundred-plus primate species are declining in population, and a whopping 60 percent face extinction, largely due to human encroachment.

Read more in Emory Magazine.

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Frankenstein and robots rise up for Atlanta Science Festival

Hair-raising, spine-tingling fun: A young visitor to the Emory campus during last year's Atlanta Science Festival experiences the thrill of static electricity.

By Carol Clark

From the lumbering, 200-year-old Frankenstein to sleek, modern-day robots, this year’s Atlanta Science Festival — set for March 9 to 24 — highlights creations that spark wonder and fun, giving glimpses of the past and the future.

The five-year-old festival expanded to more than two weeks, encompassing 120 events sponsored by 90 different partners at 70 venues across metro Atlanta, including many on the Emory campus. The festival culminates with a day-long “Exploration Expo” on Saturday, March 24, set in Piedmont Park.

“Rise Up, Robots!” kicks off the festival on the evening of Friday, March 9 at the Ferst Center, when three robots and their inventors will take the stage.

“We thought about how we could possibly top last year’s featured speaker, astronaut Mark Kelly — someone so inspirational to children and adults all over the planet,” says Meisa Salaita, co-director of the Atlanta Science Festival. “We finally realized that no human could match him, and we would have to resort to artificial intelligence.”

Heather Knight, professor of robotics at Oregon State University, will demonstrate the interactive quips of “Data,” the world’s first robotic comedian. Georgia Tech’s Gil Weinberg will jam with “Shimon,” a marimba playing robotic musician. And Stewart Coulter, from DEKA Research and Development, will show how a bionic arm named LUKE (Life Under Kinetic Evolution) changed an amputee’s life.

Tickets are required for the event, which starts at 7 pm. Door open early with an Interactive Robotic Petting Zoo, starting at 6 pm.

Frankenstein rises up on the Emory campus on Thursday, March 22. Three Atlanta playwrights will reanimate Mary Shelley’s creation, which turns 200 this year, in the context of scientific research ongoing at Emory. Following the short plays join ethicists, scientists and the playwrights to discuss the work over refreshments. The event, titled “Frankenstein Goes Back to the Lab,” begins at 5:30 pm in Emory’s Science Commons.

On Friday, March 23, from 3:30 to 7 pm, Emory will host “Chemistry Carnival,” where visitors can join scientists in carnival games like Peptide Jenga and Bacterial Telepathy, in the Atwood Chemistry Center. On the same day and time, the ever-popular “Physics Live!” will again feature giant soap bubbles and liquid nitrogen ice cream, among other treats in the Math and Science Center.

A new Emory event this year, “Science.Art.Wonder,” will run concurrently with the chemistry and physics events, on the Emory Quadrangle and in nearby buildings, including White Hall and the Atwood Chemistry Center. For the past year, the program has paired local artists and scientists to explore ideas of research through the visual arts. You can stroll through an exhibit of the resulting artwork and meet some of the artists and scientists involved in the project.

Adult fare is featured on Monday, March 19, including “The Science of ‘Motherese,’” an overview of early vocal development in infants at the Marcus Autism Center, and “CDC in the Scene,” which features CDC scientists sorting fact from fiction surrounding movies like “Outbreak,” in the Mathematics and Science Center.

On Tuesday, March 20, “Become an Archeologist” lets you in on secrets revealed by ancient skeletons and artifacts, while “Mock Climate Change Negotiation” turns you into an international policymaker for a day.

During “Unveiling the Internet,” on Wednesday, March 21, Emory computer scientists will give interactive lessons on everything from the workings of YouTube to Snapchat.

“STEM Gems: Giving Girls Role Models in STEM Careers,” on Saturday, March 10, is an interactive discussion where panelists offer advice and guidance specific to girls and young women intrigued by science, technology, engineering and math. “Women and Minorities in STEM: Surprises, Setbacks and Successes,” set for the evening of Thursday, March 22 at the Oxford campus, is a panel discussion with voices from a diverse set of scientific fields who will share their stories and take questions.

Click here for more details of Emory campus events, and events throughout the city featuring members of the Emory community.

Among the dozen Emory booths at “Exploration Expo” will be chemistry students running their non-Newtonian fluid dance pit. The Center for the Study of Human Health will explore the human gut microbiome in a booth called “Your Hundred Trillion Best Friends.” And the “Science.Art.Wonder” team will display art from the program and invite you to help create a mural.

The Atlanta Science Festival was founded by Emory, Georgia Tech and the Metro Atlanta Chamber and is a collaboration among diverse community partners and sponsors.

'The Enlightened Gene' bridges Buddhism and biology

Tibetan monk Geshe Yungdrung Konchok (left) and Emory biologist Arri Eisen (right) pose with the Dalai Lama, who wrote an introduction for their new book, "The Enlightened Gene." The book explores how dialogue between scientists and monastics enriches understandings of biology, physics and other sciences. 

By April Hunt, Emory Report

For nearly a decade, the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative has done more than challenge the idea that religion and science don’t mix by developing and successfully launching a comprehensive science curriculum for thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns.

The first major change to Tibetan Buddhist monastic education in six centuries also demonstrated how insights and information from both the monastics and professors could enrich each other’s understanding of biology, physics and other sciences.

Arri Eisen, an Emory College professor of pedagogy in biology and the Institute for Liberal Arts, explores those connections in “The Enlightened Gene,” a book he co-wrote with one of the monks, Geshe Yungdrung Konchok.

“He grew up on the Tibetan plateau herding yaks. I grew up one of about five Jewish guys in North Carolina in the 1970s,” Eisen says. “We had different experiences, but we could use them to develop a common approach, to try to better understand our world.”

Emory has woven Western and Tibetan Buddhist intellectual traditions together since founding the Emory-Tibet Partnership in 1998. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been a Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory since 2007.

Read more in Emory Report.

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