<div dir="ltr"><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">Dear all,</p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">We look forward to seeing you <b>next</b> <b>Tuesday (04/22) from 12:00-1:00 PM (ET)</b> for the next talk of CMU AI Seminar, sponsored by <a href="https://sambanova.ai/" target="_blank">SambaNova Systems</a>. The seminar will be held in <b>NSH 3305</b> with pizza provided and will be streamed on Zoom.</p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">To learn more about the seminar series or to see the future schedule, please visit the seminar website (<a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aiseminar/" target="_blank">http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aiseminar/</a>).</p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,0)">Next Tuesday (04/22) Ameet Talwalkar (CMU) will be giving a talk titled: "<span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Why AI Needs Specialization</span>".</span></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span style="font-size:13px;text-decoration-line:underline"><b>Abstract</b></span>: <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial,sans-serif">While modern AI holds great promise, the gap between its hype and practical impact remains substantial. This talk advocates for the importance of specialization to help bridge that gap—urging researchers to tailor problem formulations, modeling approaches, data collection, and evaluation methods to concrete downstream tasks. We begin by examining the limitations of existing domain-specific foundation models–for genomics, satellite imaging, and time series–that apply techniques from core AI domains such as vision and NLP with minimal specialization. We then present recent work from CMU and Datadog AI Research that advances specialized approaches on two distinct tasks: autonomously executing complex web tasks and proactively detecting or predicting disruptions in production software systems. These efforts highlight the critical role of domain-aware design in moving beyond shiny demos and toward meaningful AI impact.</span></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span style="text-decoration-line:underline"><b>Bio:</b></span> <span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Ameet Talwalkar is an associate professor in the Machine Learning Department at CMU and Chief Scientist at Datadog. His current research interests include ML for science, human-AI interaction, and developing specialized foundation models and agents. He co-founded Determined AI (acquired by HPE), helped create MLlib in Apache Spark, co-authored the textbook 'Foundations of Machine Learning,' and created an award-winning edX MOOC on distributed machine learning. He also spearheaded the creation of the MLSys conference.</span></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><b>In person: NSH 3305</b></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">Zoom Link:<b> </b><a href="https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93599036899?pwd=oV45EL19Bp3I0PCRoM8afhKuQK7HHN.1" target="_blank"><b>https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93599036899?pwd=oV45EL19Bp3I0PCRoM8afhKuQK7HHN.1</b><b></b></a></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px"><br></p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px">Best regards,</p><p style="font-size:13px;margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:15px">Eungyeup</p></div>