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Research Office

WVU AI Discussion Group

WVU AI Discussion Group

Monthly Talks, Open Conversations, Collaborative Projects

Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a buzzword—it’s transforming how we research, teach, and behave. The AI Discussion Group offers a space for students, faculty, and staff to:

  • Learn from invited speakers and from each other.
  • Discuss how AI affects academic integrity, pedagogy, and research.
  • Collaborate on projects that help position WVU as a leader in AI-informed education.

We’re currently coordinating via a simple mailing list. To get involved:

Email Prof. Aldo Romero to be added to the group. This effort is supported by the High Performance Computing team of the WVU Research Office.

Prefer a calendar invite version? Just ask—we’ll send you a recurring Zoom invite.

Benefit What You Gain

Stay Current

Keep up with AI developments that impact research, teaching, and campus policy.

Learn from Experts

Attend monthly talks from leading voices on AI applications in higher education.

Shape the Future

Share your perspective—whether optimistic, critical, or curious—and help drive WVU’s AI strategy forward.

Fall 2025 – Spring 2026

We meet on the last Friday of each month at 10:00 AM (ET), except December.

Next Talk

Our next WVU AI Discussion Group meeting is Friday, November 21, 10:00–11:00 a.m. ET (Friday before the week of Thanksgiving).

Speaker

Dr. Lily Xu is an incoming Sun-Wu Assistant Professor of IEOR at Columbia (July 2025) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Department of Economics. Her work fuses reinforcement learning, combinatorial bandits, and algorithmic game theory with causal evaluation to drive real decisions in conservation and public health—most visibly through field-tested anti-poaching patrol planning (PAWS/SMART) and partnerships with leading NGOs. She earned her PhD in Computer Science at Harvard (advised by Milind Tambe), and her scholarship spans Science, Phil. Trans. B, Conservation Letters, and top ML venues (ICLR, AAAI, UAI, IJCAI), including an AAAI Best Paper runner-up. Honors such as the Google PhD Fellowship (one of 13 global awardees) and Siebel Scholar recognition mark her as a rising leader. Beyond papers, she has helped set community agendas through workshops and invited/keynote talks from the National Academies to ETH Zürich. In short, Xu’s research is mathematically rigorous, deployed at scale, and policy-relevant—exactly the kind of work that moves AI from promising models to measurable impact in the world.

Title

High-stakes decisions from low-quality data: AI decision-making for planetary health.

Abstract

Planetary health recognizes the inextricable link between human health and the health of our planet. Our planet’s growing crises include biodiversity loss, with animal population sizes declining by an average of 70% since 1970, and maternal mortality, with 1 in 49 girls in low-income countries dying from complications in pregnancy or birth. Overcoming these crises will require effectively allocating and managing our limited resources. My research develops data-driven AI decision-making methods to do so, overcoming the messy data ubiquitous in these settings. Here, I’ll present technical advances in multi-armed bandits, robust reinforcement learning, and causal inference, addressing research questions that emerged from on-the-ground challenges across conservation and maternal health. I’ll also discuss bridging the gap from research and practice, with anti-poaching field tests in Cambodia, field visits in Belize and Uganda, and large-scale deployment with SMART conservation software.

Upcoming Schedule

Read our past AI newsletters—packed with WVU updates, educational AI news, and research roundups:

Want to stay in the loop? Subscribe by emailing alromero@mail.wvu.edu to receive future issues directly.

Questions, speaker ideas, or collaboration suggestions? Reach out to Prof. Aldo Romero, Director of Research Computing.