Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Steven Franconeri, Northwestern Psychology "A Neural Network Model of Human Perception + Understanding in Data Visualizations"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Steven Franconeri - Director, Cognitive Science Program and Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University
Title:
A Neural Network Model of Human Perception + Understanding in Data Visualizations
Abstract:
An analyst seeks a set patterns in a dataset, and later decides to communicate a given pattern to a non-expert audience in an intuitive way. Picking the right visualizations can vastly improve the speed, accuracy, and thoroughness of these steps, by orders of magnitude. Existing formal models for this choice are primitive, consisting of a few dozen rules of thumb with severely limited generalizability. Expert designers use intuition and iterative brainstorming processes that have proven too difficult to formally capture.
In collaboration with specialists in neural network modeling, cognitive science, and data visualization, we are building a realistic deep neural network model of how humans perceive and understand visually depicted data. The model will predict human performance on perceiving a given pattern within a given visualization. It will be sensitive to individual differences in graphical understanding and domain expertise, allowing it to diagnose why a viewer has made a mistake, and automatically prescribe either annotation or pedagogy as remediation.
Speaker Bio:
Steve Franconeri is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern, and Director of the Northwestern Cognitive Science Program. He studies Visuospatial Thinking, especially within Information Visualization and Education, as well as Visual Communication.
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data 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.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
No classes - Memorial Day - University offices are closed
University Academic Calendar
All Day
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No classes - Memorial Day - University offices are closed
Time
Monday, May 25, 2026
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University Academic Calendar
Data Science Nights - MAY 2026 - Speaker: Xudong Tang, Computer Science and NICO
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
5:30 PM
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M416, Technological Institute
Details
MAY MEETING: Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 5:30pm (US Central)
LOCATION:
ESAM Conference Room, Tech M416
2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208
AGENDA:
5:30pm - Meet and greet with refreshments
6:00pm - Talk with Xudong Tang, PhD Student, Computer Science, NICO, and the Human-AI Collaboration Lab, Northwestern University
TALK TITLE:
Human and Machine Perception of Voice Similarity
ABSTRACT:
Modern voice cloning systems generate synthetic speech that listeners frequently cannot identify as being synthetic. But a voice can sound natural without sounding like the intended person, and what determines whether a clone is heard as a particular person is an open question. Here we report a large-scale preregistered experiment in which we collected 92,239 responses from 175 participants on their perception of pairs of real recordings, voice clones, and continuously morphed voices drawn from 100 contemporary celebrities across 20 speaker groups. We find that voice clones do not reliably preserve perceived speaker identity, reducing same-speaker judgments by 12.7 percentage points even though the clones are produced by a state-of-the-art text-to-speech model, while leaving different-speaker judgments unchanged. Using continuously morphed stimuli, we find that speakers vary substantially in how much variation their perceived identity tolerates, and that this variation is not predicted by speaker demographics. Speaker embeddings account for 58.9\% (95\% CI = [55.7, 61.9]) of variance in identity judgments, which is more than acoustic features, social attributes, and clone status combined. Once all these observed features are accounted for, clone status adds no additional predictive power. These results shows that the perceptual impact of voice cloning is positional rather than categorical: we can model how listeners judge a voice by how close it falls to the perceptual boundary that defines each speaker's recognizable voice, applying the same criterion to real and synthetic speech alike.
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
FUTURE DATES:
Data Science Nights will return in September!
Time
Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
M416, Technological Institute Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Spring 2026 Commencement
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Spring 2026 Commencement
Time
Sunday, June 14, 2026
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Juneteenth - University Closed
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Juneteenth - University Closed
Time
Friday, June 19, 2026
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Independence Day (observed) - University Closed
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Independence Day (observed) - University Closed
Time
Friday, July 3, 2026
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Fall 2026 Classes Begin
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Fall 2026 Classes Begin
Time
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
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