CS&E Colloquium: Attention in Vision-based AI Systems

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Catherine Qi Zhao (University of Minnesota), will be giving a talk titled, "Attention in Vision-based AI Systems".

Abstract

Imagine you are at a bus stop in an unfamiliar city. You quickly glance around, gather and synthesize the information, and decide your next steps. While this process may seem intuitive, it represents a highly sophisticated ability to select and process information effectively. Our research is focused on developing machine intelligence that can understand and interact with the environment in a way that mimics human cognitive abilities.

I will begin by discussing attention prediction—specifically, the capability of machines to identify the most relevant information. I will delve into our computational models and experimental methods for attention prediction and understanding. Following this, I will explore new approaches that utilize attention to enhance interpretability and task performance. I will also present our research that builds upon attention the reasoning and knowledge integration capabilities to elucidate and refine the opaque and bias-prone decision-making processes in learning-
based AI systems. Lastly, I will discuss practical applications of our models and data in healthcare and manufacturing, where we enabled translations by clearing roadblocks of AI deployment which in turn amplified the impact of our AI innovations.

Biography

Catherine Qi Zhao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, specializing in computer vision and machine learning with a strong multidisciplinary focus. Her research is currently supported by the NSF, NIST, and NIH. Dr. Zhao has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals and held significant roles in the academic community. She serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. Additionally, she is the Program Chair at WACV 2022 and serves as an organizer or Area Chair at prestigious conferences such as CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICCV regularly. Dr, Zhao received the 2024 George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research.