Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Kristian Hammond, Northwestern University "Communicating with the New Machine: Human Insight at Machine Scale"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level Chambers Hall
Details
Communicating with the New Machine: Human Insight at Machine Scale
Speaker:
Kristian Hammond - Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, and Chief Scientist at Narrative Science.
Talk Abstract:
The world of big data is at an inflection point. We have crafted a rich collection of methods for gathering, managing and analyzing massive data sets in business, government, public policy and our day-to-day lives. On top of this, our analytic capabilities make it possible of use to discover powerful correlations, trends and predications in the data we have. And, more recently, the rise of machine learning has given us even greater power to mine our data for information.
But this is not the end of the game. The numbers alone simply do not provide us with what we really need: information and insight. The data are only the first step in making these insights available and useful to the decision makers who need them.
In this talk, I will outline what we are with regard to data analytics and how the technology of automatic narrative generation from data plays the crucial role of bridging the gap between the Big Data world of numbers and symbols and our need for understandable insights. I will dive into use cases from business, education and everyday life to show how the power of automatically generated narratives can provide us all with the insights that are still trapped in the wealth of data we now control.
Live Stream:
To join the Meeting: bluejeans.com/8474912527
To join via Browser: bluejeans.com/8474912527/browser
Time
Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
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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