Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Alina Arseniev-Koehler, UC San Diego "Disease Frames and their Consequences for Stigma, Advocacy, and Research Funds"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Postdoctoral Fellow, UC San Diego in the Division of Biomedical Informatics, and Assistant Professor of Sociology, Purdue University
Title:
Disease Frames and their Consequences for Stigma, Advocacy, and Research Funds
Abstract:
Illnesses are often understood through frames: for instance, as battles, journeys, or even as criminal acts. Framing highlights some aspects of a condition, while hiding other aspects; this can be stigmatizing or motivating. This ongoing research with Rachel Best studies disease frames at scale, including their consequences for stigma, advocacy, and research funds. We examine 6 frames for 106 conditions in news media, using a combination of word embedding and regression methods. Our corpus includes over four million news and magazine articles and news broadcasts, about health and illness, and published between 1980 and 2018. First, we examine how diseases are framed around gender, medicalization, criminalization, and philanthropy, as well as battle and journey metaphors. Second, we examine the extent to which each frame is associated with diseases’ level of stigma, advocacy, and amount of federal research funding. Finally, we examine relationships between these frames: to what extent do illness frames compete versus cohere?
Speaker Bio:
Alina Arseniev-Koehler is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, currently on leave for postdoctoral training in biomedical informatics at UC San Diego. She specializes in cultural sociology, the cultural determinants of heath including social stigma, and computational methods (especially, natural language processing). Her research has been featured in top tier outlets including PNAS, American Journal of Public Health, and American Sociological Review.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92596866667
Passcode: NICO2024
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, April 17, 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
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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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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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