Generative AI and the Future of Research Speaker Series: Diyi Yang

Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Her research focuses on human-centered natural language processing and computational social science.  She is a recipient of  Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2021),  NSF CAREER Award (2022), an ONR Young Investigator Award (2023), and a Sloan Research Fellowship (2024).   Her work has received multiple paper awards or nominations at top NLP and HCI conferences. 

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized human-AI interaction, but their success depends on addressing key challenges like privacy and effective collaboration. In this talk, we first share how language agents can help empower humans to learn diverse social skills such as listening skills and conflict resolution to demonstrate the societal impact of human-AI interaction. We then present PrivacyLens, a general framework to evaluate privacy leakage in LLM agents’ trajectories. By evaluating a variety of LLMs, PrivacyLens reveals contextual and long-tail privacy vulnerabilities. The last part introduces Co-Gym, a novel platform for studying human-agent collaboration. Our findings reveal that collaborative agents consistently outperform their fully autonomous counterparts in multiple human-AI interaction tasks. Overall, this talk highlights how to develop AI systems that are trustworthy and capable of fostering meaningful collaboration with human users.

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Speaker Series continues in Spring with a new theme of “Generative AI and the Future of Research.” Our speakers will share their research on the opportunities and risks associated with the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI usage in scholarship.

We meet most Wednesdays, 9am-10am Central time, in Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend. More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series website. For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list. Our Spring series is led by Yuanxi Fu and Timothy McPhillips, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.