Nikhil Krishnaswamy

I am beyond excited that we have been awarded a contract on the DARPA Friction and Accountability in Conversational Transactions (FACT) AI Exploration program! Our project, TRACE: Transparency, Reflection, and Accountability in Conversational Exchanges, will address a lack of “friction” (deliberation and reflective reasoning) in LLMs that prevent them from being used reliably in mission-critical workflows.

I’m on the latest episode of The Pulse, NPR’s science and health podcast, talking about AI and spatial reasoning and… plumbing?

Congratulations to Aniket Tomar on successfully defending his Master’s thesis!

Yesterday, at about 4:37 pm Mountain Time, we had to say goodbye to our boy Hex. We estimate he was about 17 and was diagnosed with an aggressive, rare form of cancer and didn’t respond effectively to treatment. Thanks to the staff at the CSU Vet Hospital who did everything they could.

Congratulations to Abhijnan Nath for defending his Master’s thesis!

I’m pleased to finally have this paper Affordance Embeddings for Situated Language Understanding published in the Language and Computation section of the Frontiers in AI journal, as part of the special issue Perspectives for Natural Language Processing between AI, Linguistics and Cognitive Science. We use vectorizations of VoxML affordance encodings to perform transfer learning to reason about the properties of unknown objects in a zero-shot condition. We’ve been trying to get this work published for a couple of years now, so it’s a very good feeling to finally have it out in a major journal. The paper is open access...

Congratulations to Dr. Dhruva Patil for defending his Ph.D. dissertation and to Jason Garcia for defending his Master’s thesis!

NYC’s FOX 5 channel did a segment on AI in the classroom that focused in part on our Diana system and how we are expanding that expertise into situation-aware, interactive AI agents to help teachers in classrooms. I’m not interviewed directly but the “CSU/Brandeis” work is shown in multiple clips (mostly taken from last year’s AAAI demo video), and my advisor, James Pustejovsky, is interviewed extensively. Unfortunately, the piece doesn’t mention NSF iSAT directly (in fact James mentioned it repeatedly but the mentions were edited out in the final product!), but this is where the work is being applied and...

I’m late to announce this since the course was approved months ago, but I’m happy to be teaching CS 542: Natural Language Processing in the Fall 2021 semester. This is, to my knowledge, the first dedicated NLP course to be taught at Colorado State, and interest seems high already. This is a grad-level, technical computer science course that complements offerings in AI, machine learning, and computer vision, but I plan to teach it with a healthy dose of both linguistic theory and application, and critical thinking about NLP technology and its uses in modern society. More information about the course...

Our demo, Situational Awareness in Human Computer Interaction: Diana’s World has won the best demo award at ICAT-EGVE (International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence & Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments), an ACM conference! Our paper is here and our demo video can be viewed here.

Today I presented a long paper, “Neurosymbolic AI for Situated Language Understanding” at the Advances in Cognitive Systems conference, held virtually and hosted by the Palo Alto Research Center.

For my last act as a postdoc/first act as a professor, I presented our late-breaking report, Situated Multimodal Control of Mobile Robot: Navigation Through a Virtual Environmment at RoboDIAL: the Special Session on Situated Dialogue with Virtual Agents and Robots at the SigDIAL conference. The conference was originally slated to take place in Boise, Idaho, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic was moved to an all-virtual format. Not knowing what to expect from a virtual conference, this has been a new experience for me, and while it was odd attending a conference via Trello, YouTube, and Zoom, having to record...

The website has been rebooted. Welcome, and please enjoy the sleek new look as I attempt to subvert expectations for faculty webpages. Although the world may seem to be crumbling at the seams right now, I’m very excited to be joining the computer science faculty at Colorado State this summer, where I hope to build a strong natural language understanding group to complement CSU’s strengths in computer vision, data science, and human-computer interaction. I’m currently looking for students who are interested in computational linguistics, multimodality, and natural language processing, so please feel free to get in touch via the contact...