Monday, February 23, 2026

2/27/26: Wolfram Alpha Pro - demo of AI functionality

Artificial Intelligence Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be added to the invite list - or removed as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda, Minutes & Status (196th meeting, Feb. 27, 2026)
  • Announcements
      • 2/27/2026: Guest speaker (Ashley B.) and demo: AI in Wolfram|Alpha Pro.
      • Today 12:15 pm. Workshop on running an AI locally. Sponsored by Dept. of Psychological Science.
      • 3/6/2026: Employment opportunities and risks in AI
      • A new forum for connecting about AI: https://www.intherock.ai.
      • "Go Fourth Fridays" series: 4th Friday of each month at Noon - 1:30. Free pizza and AI real-world AI insights. Reynolds First Floor Atrium. Noon - 12:30: Lunch & networking (FREE PIZZA! 🍕)
            12:30 - 1:30: Presentations & open mic for YOUR ideas. Contact: Marla Johnson mkjohnson@ualr.edu
      • Any other announcements? 
    • Other plans for future meetings
      • Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
        • DR website/book(s)
        • Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
        • We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
      • Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
        • What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
        • AB has a paper under revision.
        • DR has a paper just published.
      • Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit.
    • Readings/viewings for future discussion. Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion. 
      • Not evaluated yet
      • https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
      • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
      • Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
      • Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
        • We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
        • Let's evaluate a few more of them.
      • LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
      • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
      • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
      • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
    •  Evaluated
      • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
      • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
      • 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
      • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
      • Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
      • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people
  • Any projects that MS students can sign up for? If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
    • Please suggest a project!  



at No comments:

Announcement

Daniel Berleant <jdberleant@ualr.edu>
You are invited: Psychological Science Colloquium Friday Feb 27th at 12:15 Topic: Local AI
1 message
Elisabeth Sherwin <ebsherwin@ualr.edu>Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 9:27 AM
Reply-To: Elisabeth Sherwin <ebsherwin@ualr.edu>
To: FACFOCUS@lists.ualr.edu
Topic: Local AI 

Presenter: Dr Mohsen Rafiei

Location: Stabler Hall 502 (go to six and take only one ramp down, bear to the right!)

In this session Dr. Rafiei will demonstrate how to set up and use a local AI system to edit and analyse sensitive data, including student records, securely and efficiently through familiar tools such as Excel. The session emphasizes practical implementation and data privacy, showing how to run AI models directly on your own machine, connect them to structured datasets, and produce reliable summaries, trend analyses, and actionable insights without transferring confidential information to external platforms.


This session is open to anyone. Consider bringing a laptop!

Future Sessions (same time and same location): 

March 20: Dr. Colton Hunter: Does Socioeconomic Status Modulate the Effects of Monetary Incentive on Working Memory?

April 24: Dr. Elisabeth Sherwin: Academic identity: What does the research say?

Best,

Elisabeth


--
Elisabeth Sherwin, Ph.D. | Professor and Chair | 
Department of Psychological Science | Stabler Hall 602 |
University of Arkansas at Little Rock | 
501-916-3171 | https://ualr.edu/psychology/


at No comments:

Friday, February 20, 2026

2/20/26: AI News Discussion Day! The latest AI buzz...

Artificial Intelligence Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be added to the invite list - or removed as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda, Minutes & Status (195th meeting, Feb. 20, 2026)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements
      • Today: "What is the latest, latest important news in AI?" This was requested as a session topic! 
        • Congrats to Dr. Dale Rutherford!!
        • DD: Carl Newport news.
        • https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00290-9
        • https://news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-ops-and-tech/anthropic-sends-legal-tech-market-warning-with-launch-of-ai-tool
        • https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/15/the-great-computer-science-exodus-and-where-students-are-going-instead/
        • https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-anthropic-tools-saas-software-stocks-selloff.html
        • https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/upshot/moltbook-artificial-intelligence-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NVA.YMTe.kups_Ip6UHEu&smid=url-share
        • ZR: I saw this on a podcast this morning.
          "In February 2026, a research team including prominent Harvard physicist Andrew Strominger and researchers from OpenAI utilized GPT-5.2 Pro to solve a previously unsolved, complex problem in quantum field theory. The collaboration demonstrated that the AI model could identify patterns and derive formulas that had eluded human physicists for years.
          “It is the first time I’ve seen AI solve a problem in my kind of theoretical physics that might not have been solvable by humans.” — Andy Strominger"
The meeting ended here.
      • 2/27/2026: Guest speaker (Ashley B.) and demo: AI in Wolfram|Alpha Pro.

      • 3/6/2026: Employment opportunities and risks in AI
      • A new forum for connecting about AI: https://www.intherock.ai.
      • "Go Fourth Fridays" series: 4th Friday of each month at Noon - 1:30. Free pizza and AI real-world AI insights. Reynolds First Floor Atrium. Noon - 12:30: Lunch & networking (FREE PIZZA! 🍕)
            12:30 - 1:30: Presentations & open mic for YOUR ideas. Contact: Marla Johnson mkjohnson@ualr.edu
    • Other plans
      • Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
        • DR website/book(s)
        • Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
        • We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
      • Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
        • What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
        • AB has a paper under revision.
        • DR has a paper just published.
      • Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit. 
  • Other 
    • Any discussion questions you'd like to hear input on? Let me know.
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
    • Any other updates or announcements?
  • Readings/viewings for discussion. Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion. 
    • Not evaluated yet
      • https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
      • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
      • Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
      • Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
        • We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
        • Let's evaluate a few more of them.
      • LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
      • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
      • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
      • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
    •  Evaluated
      • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
      • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
      • 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
      • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
      • Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
      • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people.
  • Back burner "when possible" items:
    • SL: "I've been asked to lead the DCSTEM College AI Ad Hoc Committee. ... We’ll discuss AI’s role in our curriculum, how to integrate AI literacy into courses, and strategies for guiding students on responsible AI use."
  • Any projects that MS students can sign up for? If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
    • Please suggest a project!  





at No comments:

Friday, February 13, 2026

2/13/26: DR on the reviewing process

Artificial Intelligence Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be added to the invite list - or removed as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda, Minutes & Status (194th meeting, Feb. 13, 2026)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements
      • DR will explain a paper and seek input on reviewing it
  •  Plans
                        Ever wonder how our local businesses use AI day-to-day? 
        Friday, Feb 27 at Noon for free pizza and real-world AI insights you can apply immediately.
        What You'll Learn:
        Josh Jones from Chick-fil-A will demo how he creates and manages
        AI agents to manage operations at one of Little Rock's busiest locations (Markham & Chenal)
        Marla Johnson shares what LR business leaders told her they wish they knew about AI—from prompting basics to building custom agents
The Details: 📅 Friday, February 27 🕛 Noon - 1:30 PM 📍 Reynolds First Floor Atrium, UA Little Rock
Schedule:
    Noon - 12:30: Lunch & networking (FREE PIZZA! 🍕)
    12:30 - 1:30: Presentations & open mic for YOUR ideas
Who Should Attend: Whether you're a business owner curious about AI, a student exploring careers, or just want to understand what all the AI hype means for Little Rock—this is for you.
   Save Your Spot: 👉 https://forms.gle/YabL14LkwZJzbi5f9   
Community members, students, and faculty all welcome. Bring your questions! Bring a friend!

      • Did anyone go?

        ---

        Th Feb. 12, 12-1pm. 

        UA Little Rock/Google Future AI Series

         "AI on Campus: A High Level Overview of
        Google's Tools for Research &
        Operations"

        Dear Campus Community,

      • I know many of you are curious about Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) and would like to know more. To help fill that knowledge gap, Google has partnered with us to do a series of monthly webinars. These webinars will start with the basics but will progress as the year goes on to include demonstrations of use cases, real-time workshopping of problems, and much more. 

        The first of these webinars will be Thursday, February 12, 2026 from 12-1 p.m. (webinar link). They will then continue on the 2nd Thursday of each month. Please think about attending these webinars to learn more about what AI can do as well as what its limitations are. I look forward to seeing you there. 
        Brian Berry, PhD | Vice Provost of Research and Dean of the Graduate School 
        AI Council Chair
    • Other plans
      • Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
        • DR website/book(s)
        • Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
        • We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
      • Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
        • What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
        • AB has a paper under revision.
        • DR has a paper just published.
      • Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit. 
  • Other 
    • Any discussion questions you'd like to hear input on? Let me know.
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
    • Any other updates or announcements?
  • Readings/viewings for discussion. Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion. 
    • Not evaluated yet
      • https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
      • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
      • Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
      • Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
        • We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
        • Let's evaluate a few more of them.
      • LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
      • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
      • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
      • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
    •  Evaluated
      • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
      • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
      • 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
      • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
      • Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
      • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people.
  • Back burner "when possible" items:
    • SL: "I've been asked to lead the DCSTEM College AI Ad Hoc Committee. ... We’ll discuss AI’s role in our curriculum, how to integrate AI literacy into courses, and strategies for guiding students on responsible AI use."
  • Any projects that MS students can sign up for? If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
    • Please suggest a project!  



at No comments:

Friday, February 6, 2026

2/6/26: BB Socratic questioning tool, etc.

Artificial Intelligence Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be added to the invite list - or removed as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda, Minutes & Status (193rd meeting, Feb. 6, 2026)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements
    • Blackboard's Socratic questioning tool. Let's try it out. Do blackboard.ualr.edu > a specific course > Content tab > Course content > + > create > AI conversation > Socratic Questioning >
    • Socratic questioning with general purpose AI chatbots
      • We could use DD's recent conference paper to test it.
      • Multi-question modification; guiding the questioner
    • Future items
      • Next week: DR will explain a paper and seek input on reviewing it
      • DR defense is in two weeks
      • 2/27/2026: Guest speaker (Ashley B.) and demo: AI in Wolfram|Alpha Pro.
      • "What is the latest, latest important news in AI?" This was requested as a session topic! 
      • "Go Fourth Fridays" series:
                        Ever wonder how our local businesses use AI day-to-day? 
        Friday, Feb 27 at Noon for free pizza and real-world AI insights you can apply immediately.
        What You'll Learn:
        Josh Jones from Chick-fil-A will demo how he creates and manages
        AI agents to manage operations at one of Little Rock's busiest locations (Markham & Chenal)
        Marla Johnson shares what LR business leaders told her they wish they knew about AI—from prompting basics to building custom agents
The Details: 📅 Friday, February 27 🕛 Noon - 1:30 PM 📍 Reynolds First Floor Atrium, UA Little Rock
Schedule:
    Noon - 12:30: Lunch & networking (FREE PIZZA! 🍕)
    12:30 - 1:30: Presentations & open mic for YOUR ideas
Who Should Attend: Whether you're a business owner curious about AI, a student exploring careers, or just want to understand what all the AI hype means for Little Rock—this is for you.
   Save Your Spot: 👉 https://forms.gle/YabL14LkwZJzbi5f9   
Community members, students, and faculty all welcome. Bring your questions! Bring a friend!

      • Th Feb. 12, 12-1pm. 

        UA Little Rock/Google Future AI Series

         "AI on Campus: A High Level Overview of
        Google's Tools for Research &
        Operations"

        Dear Campus Community,

      • I know many of you are curious about Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) and would like to know more. To help fill that knowledge gap, Google has partnered with us to do a series of monthly webinars. These webinars will start with the basics but will progress as the year goes on to include demonstrations of use cases, real-time workshopping of problems, and much more. 

        The first of these webinars will be Thursday, February 12, 2026 from 12-1 p.m. (webinar link). They will then continue on the 2nd Thursday of each month. Please think about attending these webinars to learn more about what AI can do as well as what its limitations are. I look forward to seeing you there. 
        Brian Berry, PhD | Vice Provost of Research and Dean of the Graduate School 
        AI Council Chair
    • Other plans
      • Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
        • DR website/book(s)
        • Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
        • We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
      • Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
        • What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
        • AB has a paper under revision.
        • DR has a paper just published.
      • Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit. 
  • Other 
    • Any discussion questions you'd like to hear input on? Let me know.
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
    • Any other updates or announcements?
  • Readings/viewings for discussion. Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion. 
    • Not evaluated yet
      • https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
      • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
      • Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
      • Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
        • We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
        • Let's evaluate a few more of them.
      • LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
      • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
      • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
      • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
    •  Evaluated
      • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
      • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
      • 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
      • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
      • Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
      • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people.
  • Back burner "when possible" items:
    • SL: "I've been asked to lead the DCSTEM College AI Ad Hoc Committee. ... We’ll discuss AI’s role in our curriculum, how to integrate AI literacy into courses, and strategies for guiding students on responsible AI use."
  • Any projects that MS students can sign up for? If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
    • Please suggest a project!  




at No comments:

Friday, January 30, 2026

1/30/26: DD paper reading

Artificial Intelligence Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be removed from the invite list as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda, Minutes & Status (192nd meeting, Jan. 30, 2026)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements
    • We could look at Blackboard's Socratic questioning tool some time (next time?). Yes, let's try it out. Do blackboard.ualr.edu > a specific course > Content tab > Course content > + > create > AI conversation > Socratic Questioning >
  • Today: readings from DD's recent conference paper. We read and discussed the title and abstract.
 The meeting ended here. 
  • Future plans
    • Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
    • DR website/book(s)
      • Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
      • We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
    • Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
    • What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
      • AB has a paper under revision.
      • DR has a paper just published.
    • Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit. 
  • Updates
    • DD. Research status?
    • Anyone else?  
  • Other 
    • Any discussion questions you'd like to hear input on? Let me know.
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
    • Any other updates or announcements?
  • Readings/viewings for discussion. Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion. 
    • Not evaluated yet
      • https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
      • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
      • Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
      • Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
        • We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
        • Let's evaluate a few more of them.
      • LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
      • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
      • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
      • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
    •  Evaluated
      • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
      • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
      • 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
      • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
      • Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
      • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people.
  • Back burner "when possible" items:
    • SL: "I've been asked to lead the DCSTEM College AI Ad Hoc Committee. ... We’ll discuss AI’s role in our curriculum, how to integrate AI literacy into courses, and strategies for guiding students on responsible AI use."
  • Any projects that MS students can sign up for? If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
    • Please suggest a project!  


at No comments:

Friday, January 23, 2026

1/23/26: Welcome back! DR leads discussion on his website and activities

Artificial Intelligence Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be removed from the invite list as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda, Minutes & Status (191st meeting, Jan. 23, 2026)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements
    • Welcome back!
  • Today 
    • DR discussed his activities and website:
      • Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
      • We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
  • Next time: readings from DD's recent conference paper.
  • Future plans
    • Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
    • Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
    • What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
      • AB has a paper under revision.
      • DR has a paper just published.
    • Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit. 
  • Updates
    • DD. Research status?
    • Anyone else?  
  • Other 
    • Any discussion questions you'd like to hear input on? Let me know.
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
    • Any other updates or announcements?
  • Readings/viewings for discussion. Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion. 
    • Not evaluated yet
      • https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
      • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
      • Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
      • Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
        • We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
        • Let's evaluate a few more of them.
      • LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
      • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
      • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
      • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
      • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
    •  Evaluated
      • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
      • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
      • 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
      • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
      • Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
      • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people.
  • Back burner "when possible" items:
    • SL: "I've been asked to lead the DCSTEM College AI Ad Hoc Committee. ... We’ll discuss AI’s role in our curriculum, how to integrate AI literacy into courses, and strategies for guiding students on responsible AI use."
  • Any projects that MS students can sign up for? If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
    • Please suggest a project!  
at No comments:
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