Alumni Events
Please join us to connect with CSE faculty and friends!
September 2025 Bay Area Meetup
Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska will give a brief update on the Allen School, and Professor Noah A. Smith will give a short talk about his research: Science of AI and AI for Science. We hope you join us to learn more about the work his team is doing to radically open up the science of language modeling.
Thursday, September 11, 2025
6:00-8:00 p.m.
Woman’s Club of Palo Alto | Palo Alto, CA
Light snacks will be provided. RSVP by August 28, 2025
Talk Details
Science of AI and AI for Science
Abstract
Neural language models with billions of parameters and trained on trillions of words are powering the fastest-growing computing applications in history and generating discussion and debate around the world. Yet most scientists cannot study or improve those state-of-the-art models because the organizations deploying them keep their data and machine learning processes secret. I believe that the path to models that are usable by all, at low cost, customizable for areas of critical need like the sciences, and whose capabilities and limitations are made transparent and understandable, is radically open development, with academic and not-for-profit researchers empowered to do reproducible science. In this talk, I’ll discuss some of the work our team is doing to radically open up the science of language modeling and make it possible to explore new scientific questions and democratize control of the future of this fascinating and important technology.
Brief Bio
Noah A. Smith is a researcher in natural language processing and machine learning, serving as the Amazon Professor at the University of Washington and Senior Director of NLP Research at the Allen Institute for AI. He co-directs the OLMo open language modeling initiative. His current work spans language, music, and AI research methodology, with a strong emphasis on mentoring—his former mentees now hold faculty and leadership roles worldwide. Smith is a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics and has received numerous awards for research and innovation.
Help us spread the word
We have lost email contact with some of our alums. Please talk to your friends and your fellow alums and encourage them to attend. If you encounter anyone who didn’t receive a direct invitation, please send us their email address so we can keep in touch.
Inquiries, please contact:
Kay Beck-Benton | kbeck@cs.washington.edu
Past Events
Summary of Past Events
June 2025 Seattle Area Meetup
Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska will give a brief update on the Allen School, and Professor Natasha Jaques will give a short talk about her research, which focuses on social reinforcement learning, and her work in the Social RL Lab. We hope you join us to learn more about social learning to improve AI agents’ learning, generalization, coordination and human-AI interaction.
Monday, June 30, 2025
4:30-6:30 p.m.
University of Washington | Seattle, WA
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Allen School Director Magda Balazinska and Professors Shwetak Patel and Amy Zhang at UWAA’s Husky Days in the Bay
Safeguarding Truth: Ethics and Safety in a Digital Era
Explore the evolving landscape of trust and safety in the age of artificial intelligence with thought leaders from the UW’s Allen School, Human-Centered Design and Engineering, Information School, and College of Arts & Sciences. This engaging conversation will tackle the ethical challenges, transformative opportunities, and societal impacts of AI, offering diverse perspectives from academia and industry. It’s a must-attend for anyone navigating the intersections of technology and humanity.
Thursday, March 13, 2025
5:30-7:30 p.m.
The Woman’s Club of Palo Alto
475 Homer Avenue | Palo Alto, CA 94301