“Attention, Humans: Exploring the Next Generation of AI Models,” presentation organized by Sigma Xi @noon Nov. 12, Ballroom A

The Mines Chapter of Sigma Xi presents “Attention, Humans: Exploring the Next Generation of AI Models,” a lecture by Dr. Mike Colagrosso at noon, Wednesday, November 12 (Ballroom A, Student Center).

All members of the Mines community and beyond are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have reached a significant inflection point with the emergence of transformer architecture and large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. We will discuss how they work, why they seem to have such remarkable performance, and where they fail. We will explore methods that extend LLM capabilities, such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and multimodal integration for image generation. We will also discuss two foundational works, "Attention Is All You Need" and "T5: Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer." The session will conclude with discussion and questions for humans only, the droids will have to wait outside.

Mike Colagrosso spent his career in machine learning, spanning both academia and industry. He was an Associate Professor in Mathematical and Computer Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines (2002-2008), where he researched machine learning and wireless sensor networks. Following his time in academia, Mike spent 13 years as a Software Engineer at Google (2011-2024), where he was instrumental in developing and launching key machine learning features in Google Drive.