Performing complex reasoning has been a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence (AI).This thesis describes a class of AI systems designed to reason, extract knowledge, and answer
questions on various domains such as process understanding, elementary science, and math word
problems. Our approach differs from traditional logical reasoning systems since we...
In the Maximum-a-Posteriori (MAP) Inference problem, for any given probability distribution, the goal is to find the point in the support of that distribution with the highest probability. Potts models and Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are probabilistic models that were introduced in the context of statistical physics several decades ago....
Task-oriented conversational systems are becoming increasingly popular, as shown by the rise of conversational recommendation systems across multiple platforms (e.g., Google Home, Alexa, and Siri) and domains (e.g., local establishments, e-commerce, books, music, and movies). However, users are still largely limited in what preferences they can express and how, as...
Human communication has become increasingly reliant on systems made and managed by large technology companies like Google, Apple, Twitter, and Meta (formerly Facebook). These systems offer people many benefits, but they also present new challenges for society. In recent years, researchers, lawmakers, and journalists have suggested that large technology companies...
Task-oriented conversational systems are becoming increasingly popular, as shown by the rise of conversational recommendation systems across multiple platforms (e.g., Google Home, Alexa, and Siri) and domains (e.g., local establishments, e-commerce, books, music, and movies). However, users are still largely limited in what preferences they can express and how, as...
Many computing technologies are primarily useful because of the existence of some set of data created by people, intentionally in some cases and unintentionally in others. For instance, technologies like search engines, recommender systems, classifiers, and language models are all dependent on digital records of things people have said, done,...
A massive amount of data is generated every second all around the world. Machine learning becomes the most attractive solution to consume the data fuel and transform it into productivity. It has yielded great results in many fields, such as healthcare, marketing, finance, etc. Machine learning models are usually designed...
The current view in neuroscience holds that the brain, together with its sensory and motor structures and the environment, form a closed-loop system – a sensorimotor loop – in which the brain receives information from the environment and converts it into a motor response while simultaneously making predictions about future...
The advent of metamaterials—hierarchical structures that manifest properties beyond those found in nature through geometry rather than material composition—inspired new possibilities and research in many fields. In mechanics, periodic metamaterials exhibit behaviors ranging from unprecedented compressibility to extreme stiffness. Numerous geometric classes of metamaterials with these properties have been discovered,...
In recent years, machine learning on graphs (or networks) has gone from a niche topic with only a few active researchers worldwide, to a heavily invested field with novel use cases for dealing with relationships and/or interactions within complex systems in the natural and social sciences. Traditionally, choosing the right...