Apr 22 at 12pm (NSH 3305) -- Ameet Talwalkar (CMU) -- Why AI Needs Specialization

[Eungyeup Kim]

Dear all,


We look forward to seeing you *next* *Tuesday (04/22) from 12:00-1:00 PM
(ET)* for the next talk of CMU AI Seminar, sponsored by SambaNova Systems
<https://sambanova.ai/>. The seminar will be held in *NSH 3305* with pizza
provided and will be streamed on Zoom.


To learn more about the seminar series or to see the future schedule,
please visit the seminar website (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aiseminar/).


Next Tuesday (04/22) Ameet Talwalkar (CMU) will be giving a talk titled: "Why
AI Needs Specialization".



*Abstract*: 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.


*Bio:* 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.


*In person: NSH 3305*

Zoom Link:
*https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93599036899?pwd=oV45EL19Bp3I0PCRoM8afhKuQK7HHN.1*
<https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93599036899?pwd=oV45EL19Bp3I0PCRoM8afhKuQK7HHN.1>


Best regards,

Eungyeup
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