Mathematics and Statistics Colloqium Talk

Speaker: Professor Yang Liu

Title: Introduction to Transformer Models in AI Science and Biostatistics

Date: November 14th 2025

Room: Math and Microbiology Building 271

Time: 3:00-4:00 pm

Meet and Greet: 2:30-3:00 pm, Lounge - 222 MM, November 14, 2025.

Abstract: Transformer models now play a major role in modern AI, and systems like ChatGPT have shown how well they can capture complex dependence structures in language data. This talk will begin with an intuitive overview of how transformers work, introducing embeddings as flexible data representations and self-attention as a way for the model to determine which elements are most relevant. I will then show how the same ideas appear in models like BERT for text understanding and Vision Transformers for image analysis. The talk will also cover applications of transformers in biostatistics, with examples in clinical note interpretation, longitudinal health records, and outcome prediction.

About the Speaker: Dr. Yang Liu is an associate professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Wright State University. His research interests focus on developing statistical and computational methods for genomic and biomedical studies.