ECE NYU Tandon Seminar Series on Modern AI: Dani Bassett TOMORROW

[Anna Choromanska]

Dear All,

The second speaker of the Spring 2025 NYU Tandon ECE Seminar Series on Modern AI is Dani Bassett from the University of Pennsylvania. They will speak TOMORROW, on the 13th of March at 11.00 am. The event is held in-person and also broadcasted via zoom:

In-person location: 6MTC MakerEvent Space

Zoom link: https://nyu.zoom.us/meeting/register/VCCseTq4QKOscSdskZFtLw#/registration

The details of the event are provided below. NYU Tandon is looking forward to seeing you all!!!

Curiosity Styles in the (Natural & Artificial) Wild Thursday, March 13, 2025 Time: 11:00 am In person: 6 MetroTech Maker Eventspace Zoom Contact: ece-anno...@nyu.edu Register Dani S. Bassett Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania They are also an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Bassett is most well-known for blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. They received a B.S. in physics from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge, UK as a Churchill Scholar, and as an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, Bassett was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. They have received multiple prestigious awards, including American Psychological Association's ‘Rising Star’ (2012), Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow (2014), MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER (2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018), OHBM Young Investigator Award (2020), AIMBE College of Fellows (2020), American Physical Society Fellow (2021), and has been named one of Web of Science's most Highly Cited Researchers for 4 years running. Bassett is the author of more than 450 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered over 58,000 citations, as well as numerous book chapters and teaching materials. Bassett’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, the ISI Foundation, and the Center for Curiosity. Bassett has recently co-authored Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (MIT Press) with philosopher and twin Perry Zurn. What is curiosity?   Across disciplines, some scholars offer a range of definitions while others eschew definitions altogether. Is the field of curiosity studies simply too young? Should we, as has been argued in neuroscience, press forward in definition-less characterization? At this juncture in the field's history, we turn to an examination of curiosity styles, and ask: How has curiosity been practiced over the last two millennia and how is it practiced today? We exercise a recent historico-philosophical account to catalogue common styles of curiosity and test for their presence as humans browse Wikipedia. Next we consider leading theories from psychology and mechanics that could explain curiosity styles, and formalize those theories in the mathematics of network science. Such a formalization allows theories of curiosity to be explicitly tested in human behavioral data and for their relative mental affordances to be investigated. Moreover, the formalization allows us to train artificial agents to build in human-like curiosity styles through reinforcement learning. Finally, with styles and theories in hand, we expand out to a study of several million users of Wikipedia to understand how curiosity styles might or might not differ around the world and track factors of social inequality. Collectively, our findings support the notion that curiosity is practiced - differently across people - as unique styles of network building, thereby providing a connective counterpoint to the common acquisitional account of curiosity in humans. This event is free and open to the public. The Seminar Series in Modern Artificial Intelligence is held at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and is hosted by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Organized by Professor Anna Choromanska, the series aims to bring together faculty and students to discuss the most important research trends in the world of AI. The speakers include world-renowned experts whose research is making an immense impact on the development of new machine learning techniques and technologies and helping to build a better, smarter, more-connected world. To make sure you keep getting these emails, please add Modern AI Seminar Series Dani S. Bassett to your address book or whitelist us. If you are not a member of the NYU Tandon community and wish to be removed from all our mailing lists, unsubscribe.  Can't see this email? View it as a webpage here.

This email was sent by: NYU Tandon School of Engineering One MetroTech Center, 19th Floor, Brooklyn, NY, 11201-3818 US Privacy Policy Update Profile      Manage Subscriptions      Unsubscribe

--

Anna Choromanska

Associate Professor

Alfred P. Sloan Fellow

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

New York University

Room 802

370 Jay Street

New York, NY 11201, USA

Office phone: 646.997.0269

ac5455 at nyu dot edu

achoroma at gmail dot com

https://engineering.nyu.edu/faculty/anna-choromanska