While the AI+X Symposium brought together nearly 200 researchers, clinicians, educators and industry experts to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming fields across society, it also provided a platform to showcase important research by students and faculty in the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing.
The annual symposium, put together by a planning committee that spanned seven colleges, Moffit Cancer Center and Tampa General Hospital, was held April 17 at USF’s Research Park. The event featured keynote presentations, expert panels and research discussions examining both the technical advancement of artificial intelligence and the ethical and societal questions emerging alongside its rapid adoption.
“The USF Institute for AI+X is a university-wide institute,” said Sudeep Sarkar, interim dean of the Bellini College. “It serves as a research and development hub where artificial intelligence intersects with virtually any discipline. The ‘+X’ is essential, it reflects our mission to enable and accelerate the adoption of AI across fields such as health, science and other areas of discovery."
A featured highlight of the symposium included a morning keynote address by Walter Scheirer, the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. The symposium’s afternoon keynote speaker, Dr. Michelle Thompson, discussed how artificial intelligence is transforming the prevention, management and reversal of chronic disease through personalized, data driven lifestyle interventions.
Through poster sessions and research panel presentations, Bellini College participants showcased how artificial intelligence is being applied to challenges across disciplines.
“The symposium highlights the depth and breadth of research coming out of the Bellini College,” Sarkar said. “Our faculty and students are not only advancing AI technologies but also applying them in meaningful ways that address real-world problems.”
USF Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing panel presentations:
- Analysis of 3D Sphere Packing and SAINT using Transformers: Chandra Kambhamettu
- Bridging PredicHve Coding and the Minimum DescripHon Length Principle: A Two-Part Code Framework for Deep Learning: Shion Matsumoto, Benjamin Prada, Abdul Malik Zekri, Ankur Mali
- Dissecting Sycophancy in Large Language Models: From Token-Level Attribution to Behavioral Intervention: Hieu Minh Nguyen, Mahammed Kamruzzaman, Gene Louis Kim
- Topological Signature of Facial Expression for Explainable Affective AI: Anis Elebiary, Shaun J. Canavan
- From Relative to Metric: Finetuning & Calibrating AI-based Monocular Depth Learning Models for Camera Trap Distance Sampling in Wildlife Monitoring Applications: Ahmed Shahabaz and Sudeep Sarkar, USF; Joanna Toczydlowska and Roman Ghulam Theuerkauf from the Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences
- A Neuro-Symbolic, Guideline-Aware Pipeline for Uterine Cancer Restaging and Treatment Recommendation from Pathology Reports: Rushitha Santhoshi Mamidala, Adrian Kohut, John Michael Templeton, Ankur Mali
- A Single Breath Becomes the Blueprint of Disease: Maximum Phonation Time as a Universal Health Biomarker: Helena Beltran, Shrramana Ganesh Sudhakar, Mohamed Ebraheem and Yael Benssoussan from USF, along with Alistair Johnson and Kirollos Armosh from Microsoft
- Enhancing Lung Cancer Risk Prediction with Longitudinal Fusion of LDCT Data: Hanieh Ajami and John Michael Templeton from USF, along with Asim Waqas, Matthew B. Schabath and Ghulam Rasool from Moffitt Cancer Center
- Stories of Pain: A Neuroanthropological Exploration of Narrative in Pain Perception and Management Using AI: Alina Jacob and Daniel Lende
USF Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing poster presentations:
- Visual Place Cell Encodings for Spatial Representation and Localization: Chance J. Hamilton, Alfredo Weitzenfeld
- Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in Multi-Goal Spatial Navigation with Autonomous Mobile Robots: Brendon Johnson, Alfredo Weitzenfeld
- Bloom-Socratic LLMs Elevate General Intellectual Humility: Mohammad Ratul Mahjabin, Raiyan Abdul Baten
- StableShape: Decoupling Identity from Pose for Consistent Human Body Shape Estimation in the Wild: Sujal Vijayaraghavan, Sudeep Sarkar
- Ethical Decision-Making in the Age of AI: An Analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs): Priya Dozier, Ankur Mali
- Quantifying Nationality-Based Compliance Bias in Qwen 2.5: Otavio Rosa, Anubhav Gupta, Mahammed Kamruzzaman and Gene Louis Kim
- Power-Mediated Compliance Differences across Identities in Large Language Models: Otavio Rosa, Anubhav Gupta, Mahammed Kamruzzaman and Gene Louis Kim
- End-to-end graph matching for fingerprint recognition using sweat pores: Dayne C. Guy, Mauricio Pamplona Segundo
- Synergizing Low-Cost Mobile Manipulation with Retrieval-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models: Mingyang Mao, Ngoc Bao Dinh, Minh Duong Nguyen, Xiaomin Lin
- Symbiotic Policy Learning: Utkarsh Grover, Xiaomin Lin
- LogicBench: A Benchmark for Logical Fault Detection in Images: Lara Radovanovic, Sahasra Kondapalli, Aadi Palnitkar, Mingyang Mao, Xiaomin Lin
- AI Course Companion: An LMS-Embedded, Course-Grounded, 24/7 AI Assistant for Studying, Teaching Insight, and Learning Analytics: Oguzhan Topsakal
- Surprisal-Rényi Free Energy: Shion Matsumoto, Raul Castillo, Benjamin Prada, Ankur Mali
- Remote Acoustic Voice Analysis for Efficient and Patient-Friendly Clinical Voice Evaluation: Shrramana Ganesh Sudhakar, Sabrina Musteric, Stephanie Watts, Jamie Toghranegar, Yael Bensoussan
- Context-aware Screening of Autism Spectrum Disorder using Multimodal Data: Rupal Agarwal, Shaun J. Canavan
- AlphaFold3 and Intrinsically Disordered Proteins: Reliable Monomer Prediction, Unpredictable Multimer Performance: Tuan Minh Dao, Sebastien Ghent, Vladimir N. Uversky, Taseef Rahman
- Victim or Perpetrator? Stylometric Analysis of Misinformation vs. Disinformation Using AI Personas: Isadora Oliveira Grasel, Raiyan Abdul Baten, Tempestt Neal
- Strategic Adaptation Under Contextual Change: Insights from a Dyadic Negotiation Testbed for AI Coaching Technologies: Mobasshira Akter Urmi, Raiyan Abdul Baten
- A Tail-Aware Penalty for Calibrating Overconfident Neural Networks: Jessica Elrefaei, Hoang Nam Tran, Seungbae Kim, Juan S. Borrero
- Artificial Intelligence Use and Neurocognitive Outcomes: Mapping Cognitive Engagement, Brain Networks, and Neural Measures: Anika Anjum, John Michael Templeton
- Enhancing Whale Detection in Satellite Imagery with Synthetic Data: Dual-Species Case Study on Southern Right and Beluga Whales: Zhenqi Wu, Xiaomin Lin from USF; Isla Duporge, Matthew Black and Scott Wolf from Princeton University; Angela Albi from University of Konstanz in Germany; and Cortney Watt from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
- An Understandable AI Model of a Going Concern Business Decision: David Tahmoush from USF, along with E. Jin Lee, Florida Gulf Coast University School of Business