Description:

The Technology & Social Behavior PhD program is excited to welcome Dr. Tal August of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to campus on Thursday, January 16th. Tal will give a talk, titled AI for Science Communication: Adapting to Different Stakeholders.

The talk is in-person, live, only in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design. Light lunch fare will be served.

Abstract: Communicating complex scientific ideas to the public is critical for an equitable, informed society, but doing so without misleading or overwhelming people is challenging. As large language models become more capable at summarizing and simplifying scientific text, we have a unique opportunity to use these models to make science more accessible. In this talk I will share my group’s research developing language tools and systems to help communicate science to more people. I will highlight two key communication strategies—based on our previous work—focused on different levels of language: explaining new findings from scientific papers and defining individual scientific terms. For both, I will discuss novel techniques we developed for adjusting generated language to fit the needs of different audiences and methods for modeling an individual reader’s background. I will close by discussing how these techniques generalize to other knowledge intensive communication tasks (e.g., legal and educational settings) and the opportunities of developing new techniques for these settings. 

Bio: Tal August is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studies how to adapt language to different audiences, with a focus on knowledge intensive domains like science, health and legal communication. Tal conducts empirical analyses to study how changes in language will affect different audiences, and he builds intelligent reading and writing systems for augmenting our language in new ways. The long term goal of Tal’s research is to improve our communication with—and understanding of—one another through technology. Tal August previously was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI. Tal received his PhD at the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Katharina Reinecke and Noah Smith.