Weekly Seminar: David Wingate
April 02, 2024
When: April 4th, 2024
Where: TMCB 1170
Talk Title: Language Models and Embeddings: Towards AI for Data Understanding
New tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning allow data scientists to move beyond charts and graphs when trying to harvest insight from data. In this talk, I will discuss how language models like ChatGPT can be used as a serious tool for data analysis, allowing researchers and scientists to perform a variety of analysis on unstructured text. Language models can also be combined with embeddings to provide powerful new ways of thinking about how to cluster and abstract data. Throughout the talk, I will discuss these tools in the context of my current research, involving applications in psychology and political science.
David Wingate received his BS and MS degrees in computer science from Brigham Young University in 2002 and 2004, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2008. He was a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist at MIT from 2008-2010. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at Brigham Young University, where he works at the intersection of machine learning and social science. His research leverages large-scale language models, such as ChatGPT, to address pressing social problems like racism and political polarization.