Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Suzan van der Lee, NU Earth and Planetary Sciences "Data-Driven Seismic Studies of Earth's Deep Dynamics"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Suzan van der Lee - Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University
Title:
Data-Driven Seismic Studies of Earth’s Deep Dynamics
Abstract:
The solid Earth is continuously reshaping, which occasionally has catastrophic consequences, such as when earthquakes cause injuries and damage. Earthquakes typically represent sudden shear dislocations along faults in the Earth's crust, which facilitate the motion of tectonic plates, for example. During faulting, earthquakes excite seismic waves that radiate throughout the Earth and not only shake the Earth's nearby surface, but also carry information about the earthquake's specific faulting mechanism as well as about physical properties of parts of the Earth's interior that the waves propagated through. Extracting this information from hundreds to thousands of time-dependent recordings of these seismic waves involves various types of data science, which intersect with methods used in medicine and materials science for non-destructive testing. Here, we focus primarily on utilizing data science to extract information on the heterogeneous structure inside the Earth's upper mantle, which reflects spatial variations in mantle temperature and composition. This spatial heterogeneity provides important clues to the solid Earth's past, present, and future dynamics. More specifically we look at how seismic tomography reveals past oceans, how former ocean floors help generate volcanism from deep within the mantle, where lava flows get stuck beneath the crust for over a billion years, and how big data and HPC help us map continental structure in three dimensions.
Speaker Bio:
Suzan van der Lee is a Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Northwestern University and a member of NICO. She strives to unravel, predict, and understand the dynamics of the Earth’s deep interior. To that end her research centers around imaging the interior structure of the Earth’s mantle and crust, using big data sets of time series of seismic ground motion. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996, after receiving an undergraduate degree from the University of Utrecht, and before completing a postdoctoral position at the Carnegie Institution for Science and working as a faculty member at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (ETH). She has led and participated in numerous big-data analyses and associated seismic data acquisition field experiments in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. She founded NUDS (Northwestern University’s Distributed Seismometers) and is currently the president-elect of the Seismology section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Google "Symbiogenesis, Computational Parallelism, and Complexity in Evolution"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP/Fellow, CTO of Technology & Society, Google
Title:
Symbiogenesis, Computational Parallelism, and Complexity in Evolution
Abstract:
Symbiogenesis-- the fusion of formerly independent self-replicating entities into a larger self-replicating entity-- is proposed as the driving force behind evolution's "arrow of time" toward ever-increasing complexity. We'll explore an Artificial Life system as a minimal motivating example, then discuss the implications for biological evolution beyond the "standard" accounts of Major Evolutionary Transitions and "intelligence explosions" in brainy species. Energetic and computational implications will also be addressed.
Speaker Bio:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on fundamental research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and Artificial Life.
In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.
An External Professor at Santa Fe Institute and a frequent public speaker, Blaise has given multiple TED talks and keynoted NeurIPS. He has also authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as two previous books, Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt. His most recent book, What Is Life?, is part 1 of the larger book What Is Intelligence?, forthcoming from Antikythera and MIT Press in September 2025.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98741396308
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Data Science Nights - November 2025 - Speaker: Feihong Xu, ESAM
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
5:30 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
NOVEMBER MEETING: Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 5:30pm (US Central)
LOCATION:
In person: Chambers Hall, Lower Level
600 Foster Steet, Evanston Campus
AGENDA:
5:30pm - Meet and greet with refreshments
6:00pm - Talk with Feihong Xu, Amaral Lab, ESAM
Talk title and abstract TBA.
DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly meetings featuring presentations and discussions about data-driven science and complex systems, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Students and researchers of all levels are welcome! For more information: http://bit.ly/nico-dsn
Time
Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Data Science Nights - December 2025 - Speaker: Yash Chainani, Chemical Engineering
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
5:30 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
DECEMBER MEETING: Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 5:30pm (US Central)
LOCATION:
In person: Chambers Hall, Lower Level
600 Foster Steet, Evanston Campus
AGENDA:
5:30pm - Meet and greet with refreshments
6:00pm - Talk with Yash Chainani, Broadbelt & Tyo Labs, Chemical Engineering
Talk title and abstract TBA.
DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly meetings featuring presentations and discussions about data-driven science and complex systems, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Students and researchers of all levels are welcome! For more information: http://bit.ly/nico-dsn
Time
Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)