The AI Disruption Speaker Series: Nihar B. Shah

Nihar B. Shah is an Associate Professor in the Machine Learning and Computer Science departments at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research is on the evaluation of science and the science of evaluation. His group develops computational tools with strong theoretical guarantees, and also designs and conducts controlled experiments for evidence-based policy design. His work has been used in the review of well over hundred thousand papers and thousands of proposals. He is a recipient of the Young Alumnus Medal from the Indian Institute of Science, a JP Morgan faculty research award, Google Research Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award 2020-25, the 2017 David J. Sakrison memorial prize from EECS Berkeley for a "truly outstanding and innovative PhD thesis", the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship 2014-16, the Berkeley Fellowship 2011-13, and several Best Paper Awards.

Abstract:
As LLMs become increasingly integrated into academic workflows, their influence is both promising and precarious. In this talk, we will explore three facets of this evolving intersection.

• The Good: LLMs executing aspects of peer review that are difficult for human reviewers.
• The Bad: Vulnerabilities in the review process to fraud such as identity theft and collusion rings.
• The Ugly: Methodological pitfalls of autonomous "AI scientists."

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Speaker Series continues in Fall on the new theme of “The AI Disruption.” Our speakers will discuss how recent advances in AI have reshaped their research — what has been made easier and what has become more difficult — and reflect upon its broader disruptive impact on society.

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 webpage. For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list. Our Fall 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 Urbana-Champaign.