Artificial Intelligence Seminar - Ameet Talwalkar April 22, 2025 12:00pm — 1:00pm Location: In Person and Virtual - ET - Newell-Simon 3305 and Zoom Speaker: AMEET TALWALKAR , Associate Professor, Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Chief Scientist, Datadog https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~atalwalk/bio.html Why AI Needs Specialization While modern AI holds great promise, the gap between its hype and practical impact remains substantial. This talk advocates for the importance of specialization to help bridge that gap—urging researchers to tailor problem formulations, modeling approaches, data collection, and evaluation methods to concrete downstream tasks. We begin by examining the limitations of existing domain-specific foundation models–for genomics, satellite imaging, and time series–that apply techniques from core AI domains such as vision and NLP with minimal specialization. We then present recent work from CMU and Datadog AI Research that advances specialized approaches on two distinct tasks: autonomously executing complex web tasks and proactively detecting or predicting disruptions in production software systems. These efforts highlight the critical role of domain-aware design in moving beyond shiny demos and toward meaningful AI impact. — Ameet Talwalkar is an associate professor in the Machine Learning Department at CMU and Chief Scientist at Datadog. His current research interests include ML for science, human-AI interaction, and developing specialized foundation models and agents. He co-founded Determined AI (acquired by HPE), helped create MLlib in Apache Spark, co-authored the textbook 'Foundations of Machine Learning,' and created an award-winning edX MOOC on distributed machine learning. He also spearheaded the creation of the MLSys conference. In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement. Event Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aiseminar/ Add event to Google Add event to iCal
