AI4Society

2024

September

Our paper, 'Towards Effective Planning Strategies for Dynamic Opinion Networks' was accepted at Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Vancouver, 2024 for poster presentation.

Kausik Lakkaraju started his internship at Mayo Clinic (Sep - Dec 2024).

August

First patent of AI4Society issued! We are pleased to share that our patent titled "US 12,067,983 – Robust useful and general task-oriented virtual assistants" [tags: chatbot monitoring, execution] has been officially issued by USPTO.

Vishal Pallagani finished his summer internship at IBM Research.

Nitin Gupta, pursuing his bachelor's at University of South Carolina, has joined us as an Undergraduate Researcher.

Our paper "AI-Assisted Research Collaboration with Open Data for Fair and Effective Response to Call for Proposals", an extension of our previous work at IAAI-24, is published at AI Magazine, AAAI-2024.

We have presented our work on "Improving SC Roads Using Insights from DoT Traffic Data" to South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), South Carolina Department of Public Safety (SCDPS), National Safety Council Southeastern Chapter (NSCSC). For more details, click here.

May

Vishal Pallagani started his summer internship at IBM Research, where he will be working on selective state space models and sequential decision making.

Our group will present their work at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) from June 1st to June 7th.

A position paper on 'On the Prospects of Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) in Automated Planning and Scheduling (APS)'
A paper on 'The Case for Developing a Foundation Model for Planning-like Tasks from Scratch'. at Planning and Reinforcement Learning (PRL) Workshop
A paper on 'Comparing Rubik's Cube Solvability in Domain-Independent Planners Using Standard Planning Representations for Insights and Synergy with Upcoming Learning Methods'. at Heuristics and Search for Domain-Independent Planning (HSDIP) Workshop
A demonstration paper on 'Solving the Rubik's Cube with a PDDL Planner'.

April

Our group will present their work at the upcoming Discover USC event on April 19th.

March

Our group will present their work at the upcoming CSE Research Symposium on March 15th.

February

Our group was involved at the premier AI conference, AAAI 2024, with:

A tutorial on 'Harnessing Large Language Models for Planning: A Lab on Strategies for Success and Mitigation of Pitfalls during that time' on Feb 21st.
A paper called 'From Cloud to Edge: Rethinking Generative AI for Low-Resource Design Challenges' at 'Artificial Intelligence for Design Problems' bridge program on Feb 21st.
A paper on deployed application: 'Promoting Research Collaboration with Open Data Driven Team Recommendation in Response to Call for Proposals' on Feb 22nd. Presented with the Deployed Application Award.
A demonstration paper on 'Expressive and Flexible Simulation of Information Spread Strategies in Social Networks Using Planning' on Feb 24th. Presented with the Best Demo Award.
A workshop on 'AI for Credible Elections: A Call To Action with Trusted AI' on Feb 26th.

Our group has lead the University of South Carolina in getting itself included as a collaborator with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC). [announcement, members]

Vishal Pallagani got elected to the Student Committee of the AAAI - the international Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence!

Likitha Valluru successfully defended her dissertation proposal on February 2nd: Trustable Methods for Group Recommendations With Application to Team Formation.

January

Rushil Thareja is joining us as a new Ph.D. student.

Likitha Valluru will present a demo paper at CODS-COMAD 2024 conference (Group recommendation). We are also co-organizing the tutorial track for the conference.

2023

December

Vishal Pallagani will present a paper at Neurips 2023 workshop on Generalized Planning (LLMs and Planning).

Biplav Srivastava will participate with two posters at Americal Geophysical Union (AGU) (AI and water).

November

Kausik Lakkaraju is presenting one paper each at IEEE TPS and ACM AI and Finance (ICAIF) conferences (AI trust).

August

Vishal Pallagani completed second internship at IBM Research, invited for next summer as well.

May

Sai Teja Paladi graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science. He helped our team in developing and deploying various tools.

April

Kausik Lakkaraju secured the best graduate student poster presentation award in the Computer Science department for his work on 'Rating of AI Systems through a Causal Lens' at the Discover USC event.

2020

October

First physical/virtual conference on Collaborative assistants for the society, 16 Oct 2020, (CASY 2020). Had 140 registered participants from around the world.