Events
Past Event
Data Science Nights - February 2025 with Shivani Kozarekar and Maya Milrod, Chemical and Biological Engineering
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
5:45 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
JANUARY MEETING: Thursday, February 27, 2025 at 5:45pm (US Central)
LOCATION:
In person: Chambers Hall, Lower Level
600 Foster Steet, Evanston Campus
AGENDA:
5:45pm - Meet and Greet
6:00pm - Talk by Shivani Kozarekar, PhD Candidate, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Maya Milrod, PhD Student, Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University
6:45pm - Q&A
ABSTRACT:
Predicting Ceiling Temperature for Recyclable Polymer Design Using Machine Learning
The rapid rise in plastic production and low recycling rates have driven the need for sustainable, recyclable materials like intrinsically circular polymers (ICPs), which can be easily recycled back to their building blockss. Predicting a system's ceiling temperature (Tc), a key indicator of its intrinsic recyclability, is challenging due to complex thermodynamic interactions. I'll share work on machine learning models that estimate Tc by predicting enthalpy and entropy of polymerization and how they are combined with chemical network expansion tools to identify novel ICPs and support plastic waste reduction efforts
DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly talks on data science techniques or applications, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Aspiring, beginning, and advanced data scientists are welcome! For more information: http://bit.ly/nico-dsn
Time
Thursday, February 27, 2025 at 5:45 PM - 7:30 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
Details
No classes - Memorial Day - University offices are closed
Time
Monday, May 25, 2026
Contact
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
Details
Spring 2026 Commencement
Time
Sunday, June 14, 2026
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar
Juneteenth - University Closed
University Academic Calendar
All Day
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Juneteenth - University Closed
Time
Friday, June 19, 2026
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Calendar
University Academic Calendar
Independence Day (observed) - University Closed
University Academic Calendar
All Day
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Independence Day (observed) - University Closed
Time
Friday, July 3, 2026
Contact
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University Academic Calendar
Fall 2026 Classes Begin
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
Fall 2026 Classes Begin
Time
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar