Event Details

Speaker: Alex Spangher, USC/ISI

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https://usc.zoom.us/j/92644921954?pwd=EPqkqRUb9xbb9MslYryIsKtp8d31aj.1

Meeting ID: 926 4492 1954

Passcode: 359182

The use of AI in human-centered creative tasks — such as journalism, scientific writing, and storytelling — has showcased their potential for assistance but highlighted a critical gap: planning. “Planning” describes actions performed before (and during) human workflows; “creative” refers to tasks humans execute where the rewards are not clearly defined. I will focus on tasks related to journalism, with specific focus on retrieving a set of sources relevant to a news story. We will show that suggestions made by current AI models do not align with decisions made by humans, and we will show methods for increasing alignment with humans. I will outline a research agenda based on this work to apply such approaches to novel creative tasks.

Speaker Bio

Alexander Spangher is pursuing his PhD in computer science at the University of Southern California; he is formerly a writer and data scientist at the New York Times. He focuses on computational journalism and is advised by Jonathan May, Emilio Ferrara and Nanyun Peng. His research is broad and has pursued the following side directions: he has worked at Microsoft Research under the mentorship of Eric Horvitz to detect misinformation. He has collaborated with EleutherAI to build state-of-the-art symbolic music models. Finally, he has collaborated with the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC) to model disruptions in nuclear fusion reactions. His work has received numerous awards: 2 Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2024, 1 Spotlight Award at ICML 2024, and an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022. He is fortunate to be supported by a 4-year Bloomberg PhD Fellowship. If speaker approves to be recorded for this NL Seminar talk, it will be posted on the USC/ISI YouTube page within 1-2 business days: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCISI. Subscribe here to learn more about upcoming seminars: https://www.isi.edu/events/  For more information on the NL Seminar series and upcoming talks, please visit: https://www.isi.edu/research-groups-nlg/nlg-seminars/