Lecture Series in AI: Danqi Chen, Princeton University
You are invited to participate in the next installment of Columbia Engineering’s Lecture Series in AI with Dr. Danqi Chen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and Associate Director of Princeton Language and Intelligence, as she presents “Training Language Models in Academia: Research Questions and Opportunities.” This public event will take place on Friday, December 6, 2024.’
Schedule
- 10:30AM-11:00AM Registration
- 11:00AM-12:00PM Lecture
Advance registration is required for both Columbia affiliates and non-affiliates.
ABOUT THE LECTURE
Large language models have emerged as transformative tools in artificial intelligence, demonstrating unprecedented capabilities in understanding and generating human language. While these models have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of benchmarks and enabled groundbreaking applications, their development has been predominantly concentrated within large technology companies due to substantial computational and proprietary data requirements. In this talk, I will present a vision for how academic research can play a critical role in advancing the open language model ecosystem, particularly by developing smaller yet highly capable models and advancing our fundamental understanding of training practices. Drawing from our research group’s recent projects, I will examine key research questions and challenges in both pre-training and post-training stages. Our work spans developing small language models (Sheared LLaMA; 1-3B parameters), the state-of-the-art <10B model on Chatbot Arena (gemma-2-SimPO), and long-context models supporting up to 512K tokens (ProLong). These examples illustrate how academic research can push the boundaries of model efficiency, capability, and scalability. I will conclude by exploring future directions and highlighting opportunities to shape the development of more accessible and powerful language models.
DISTINGUISHED LECTURER
Danqi Chen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and Associate Director of Princeton Language and Intelligence
Danqi Chen is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and co-leads the Princeton NLP group. She is also an Associate Director of Princeton Language and Intelligence. Her recent research focuses on training, adapting, and understanding large language models, especially with the goal of making them more accessible to academia. Before joining Princeton, Danqi was a visiting scientist at Facebook AI Research. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University (2018) and her B.E. from Tsinghua University (2012), both in Computer Science. Her research was recognized by a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, a Samsung AI Researcher of the Year award, and outstanding paper awards from ACL and EMNLP.
Accessibility
Columbia University makes every effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend an event at Columbia University, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212.854.2388 or access@columbia.edu.