Picture this: you’re getting ready to watch a movie on Netflix, popcorn in hand, and several films pop up that have been curated just for you. What are you going to do: choose one from the list recommended by the underlying AI algorithm, or worry about how this list was generated and whether you should trust it? Now, think about when you are at the doctors’ office and the physician decides to consult an online system to figure out what dosage of medicine you as the patient should take. Would you feel comfortable having a course of treatment chosen for you by artificial intelligence? What will the future of medicine look like where the doctor is not involved at all in making the decision?
Computer and Information Science
A Department of the School of Engineering and Applied Science
Featured Stories
In the Spotlight: Mingmin Zhao and Building a Bridge Between Machine Learning and Monitoring Health
One of the Assistant Professor’s who has joined both CIS and ESE this past Fall is Mingmin Zhao, an MIT graduate with a PhD focusing on building wireless sensing systems with artificial intelligence. The collaboration between CIS and a number of departments at Penn is what encouraged Zhao to further his research and teaching career here.
“Penn provides a fertile ground for interdisciplinary research not only within the CIS department but also with other departments, including ESE, medical school, nursing school, etc.” said Zhao, “I am very excited about collaborating with people at Penn and working on highly-impactful interdisciplinary research.”
The C.I.S. Blog Presents- "DALL-E Art Gallery"
To showcase this AI system and what it can do I had asked all students from the C.I.S. department, from Undergrad to Ph.D., to send in the descriptions that they prompted and to have fun with it.
C.I. S. and Penn Engineering Halloween Celebration 2022
This year’s Halloween celebration for Penn Engineering was a great success! Held in Quain Courtyard this past Monday, October 31, students, staff, and faculty gathered for trick or treating, hot apple cider and hot chocolate, and a costume contest.
In the Spotlight: Osbert Bastani and Integrating Machine Learning into Real-world Settings
“Penn has a great group of faculty working on interesting research problems, and they are all incredibly supportive of junior faculty. I’ve been fortunate enough to collaborate with Penn CIS faculty in a range of disciplines, from programming languages to NLP to theory, and I hope to have the chance to collaborate with many more.” (Osbert Bastani)
DSL and SIG Lab Renovations: Out with the Old, In with the New
As the School of Engineering and Applied Science grows, so do the rooms that house all of the creative minds within our departments. Just in time for the Fall 2022 semester, two labs that are a part of the C.I.S. Department and are located in the Moore Building have gotten a makeover this past summer and the faculty and students are thrilled. The Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL) in Moore 100 and The SIG Center for Computer Graphics in Moore 103 have both undergone renovations for more student space to collaborate, create and liven up the space!
The ASSET Center: Enabling Trust Between AI and its User
In the Spotlight: Eric Wong and Developing Debuggable AI-Systems
What happens when AI goes wrong? Probably not the Terminator or the Matrix – despite what Hollywood suggests – but rather, something that could still harm a human, such as a self-driving car that gets into an accident, or an algorithm that discriminates against certain people. Fortunately Penn has innovative researchers like Eric Wong, who build tools to make sure AI works correctly!
CIS Events
ASSET Seminar: “Getting Computers to Do What We Want: Programming Meets Machine Learning” (Michael Littman, Brown University)
ASSET/IBI Symposium on Trustworthy AI for Health Care
ASSET Seminar: “Towards Code-Aware Code Models” (Baishakhi Ray, Columbia University)
Announcements
Why Penn CIS?
The Department of Computer and Information Science (CIS) at Penn Engineering is uniquely positioned to propel future intellectual leaders, entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators to success. As an Ivy League institution, and the first university in the nation, The University of Pennsylvania ensures its students a transformative experience. Computer science at Penn comes in a variety of forms to meet your specific interests.
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