Dance Your PhD

 

Pictured: “The PsychGenerator” with HLAB members.

The Department of Computer Science is proud to announce that doctoral student Huy Vu and colleagues in Professor Andy Schwartz’s research lab was one of the winners of this year’s Dance Your Ph.D. contest.

The annual American Association for the Advancement of Science and its research journal, Science, hold the annual contest that asks people to turn their Ph.D. thesis into a dance.

Vu is a fifth-year computer science Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University who works with Schwartz to apply machine learning to psychology research to understand the relationship between human language and underlying psychological constructs. “Isn’t it cool to transform a person’s thought, something very abstract, into a concrete numeric vector space and then manipulate, analyze these vectors?” said Vu.

In the dance piece, Vu focuses “The PsychGenerator.” This artificial intelligence model which is based on GPT generates natural language with characteristics or psychology states such as personality traits and mental health. Schwartz’s Human Language Analysis Beings (HLAB) focuses on developing human-centered Artificial Intelligence      techniques that they are finding can accurately assess and understand human psychological and physical health. 

Dance Your Ph.D. started when scientist John Bohannon attended a New Year’s Eve party that was “heavy on the scientists and light on the dancing.” As a Science contributor, Bohannon asked guest to explain their research without using words.

Check out the winning video, which was also featured in this university story, on Youtube.

 

 

 

 

 

-Kimberly Xiao