Distinguished Speakers Present at CIVS Seminars
CIVS hosted four Distinguished Speaker Seminars in the areas of AI, 3-D printing, & casting, presenting to PNW and CIVS students, faculty, and staff. The speakers were 1) Rudolf Moravec from U. S. Steel, 2) Shafkat Islam, PNW Assistant Professor of Computer Science, 3) Sumedh Sharma, PNW Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, and 4) Yang Ni, PNW Assistant Professor of Computer Science.
On Friday, September 26, CIVS welcomed Rudolf Moravec of U.S. Steel, to give a seminar to CIVS students and staff and PNW College of Engineering students. Rudolf’s presentation was very well received and was followed by a productive Q&A. His presentation was titled “Theory & Application of Continuous Casting Process at U.S. Steel”. Introduction to continuous casting process at U.S. Steel with focus on bloom and slab casting capability and process improvement approach. The presentation will explain importance of each step of continuous casting machine where liquid steel is converted to solid steel.
On Friday, October 17, CIVS had the pleasure of co-sponsoring a Distinguished Speaker Seminar with the PNW MCE department. Sumedh Sharma, Ph.D. PNW Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, presented “Printing the Future: Structural Design and Visualization in Additive Construction” to CIVS and PNW students, staff, and faculty. His talk was very well received and provided an overview of additive construction, recent advancements in structural design methodologies, and how innovative visualization techniques could accelerate the adoption of this revolutionary technology.
On Friday, November 14, CIVS had the pleasure of co-sponsoring a Distinguished Speaker Seminar with the PNW CS department. Shafkat Islam, Ph.D., PNW Assistant Professor of Computer Science, presented “Towards Robust & Secure AI Agents in Open-World” to CIVS and PNW students, staff, and faculty. His talk was very well received and concluded with a productive Q&A session. Ensuring secure and robust AI agents in open-world environments is vital to counter emerging cyber threats. This talk presents three research directions: (i) an environment-agnostic, evidence-based framework for assessing AI robustness, (ii) analysis and defense against triggerless backdoor attacks in federated learning, and (iii) orchestration and monitoring strategies for resilient, fault-tolerant computation in heterogeneous platforms.
On Friday, December 12, CIVS co-sponsored a Distinguished Speaker Seminar with the PNW CS department. Yang Ni, Ph.D., PNW Assistant Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the NEXIS lab presented “Less is More — Towards Efficient Vision Transformers in Perception and Reasoning” to CIVS and PNW students, staff, and faculty. The remarkable success of recent large foundation models stems from the versatility of the transformer architecture and large-scale pre-training on massive multimodal datasets. Originally introduced in natural language processing, the attention-centric transformer design has become the dominant paradigm across domains. More recently, transformers have emerged as the backbone of modern computer vision models. However, when high-resolution images are processed, they are decomposed into thousands of tokens, orders of magnitude more than typical text inputs, causing the quadratic computational complexity. To address this challenge, current research has focused on reducing the number of image tokens participating in attention. A central question then arises: which tokens truly carry essential information, and which can be safely pruned? This talk provides an overview of recent advances in token reduction strategies for efficient transformers, with an emphasis on large vision-language models (LVLMs) where perception and reasoning are deeply integrated.