Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Jeremy Birnholtz, Northwestern School of Communication "Self-Presentation in Sociotechnical Life: How We Present Ourselves to Each Other in a World of Digital Platforms"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Jeremy Birnholtz, Professor, School of Communication, Northwestern University
Title:
Self-Presentation in Sociotechnical Life: How We Present Ourselves to Each Other in a World of Digital Platforms
Abstract:
Self-presentation, rooted in Goffman’s classic work, is the fundamental social process by which people shape their public personas and play the social roles (e.g., teacher, student, lesbian, doctor, etc.) that structure our everyday interactions. Today’s social platforms and communication technologies, however, complicate this process in ways that Goffman could never have anticipated. Specifically, the “physics” of how information moves in the environment have changed and can vary widely from platform to platform. And we lack a systematic framework for discussing these differences and how people cope with them (and their consequences). In this talk, I will discuss a book manuscript Michael Ann DeVito and I are working on to address this gap. I will give an overview of the framework, our focus in particular on LGBTQ+ populations, and how we can use this work to better understand and describe important social behavior in a range of online contexts.
Speaker Bio:
Jeremy Birnholtz is a Professor in the Communication Studies and, by courtesy, Computer Science Departments at Northwestern University. He is a recent past Van Zelst Research Professor and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern, and has also worked as a visiting professor at Facebook. Jeremy has been studying the social dynamics of online attention and self-presentation for nearly 20 years in work supported by the National Science Foundation, Facebook and Google. His work has been published in top journals and conferences in HCI, organization behavior and communication.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95815707325
Passcode: NICO2024
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. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, February 28, 2024 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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Calendar
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
University Academic Calendar
All Day
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Spring 2026 Commencement
Time
Sunday, June 14, 2026
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Juneteenth - University Closed
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All Day
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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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All Day
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Fall 2026 Classes Begin
Time
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
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