Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Niall Mangan, Northwestern "Data-driven model selection for dynamic, biological systems"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Niall Mangan, Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering Sciences & Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University
Title:
Data-driven model selection for dynamic, biological systems
Abstract:
Inferring the structure and dynamical interactions of complex systems is critical to understanding and controlling their behavior. As higher fidelity data becomes available, rapid generation and evaluation of mechanistically meaningful models from data is increasingly possible. I will present a data-driven framework for sparse identification of nonlinear dynamical systems (SINDy). SINDy subselects a set of models from the combinatorial possibilities represented in the feature library. To enable discovery of a broader class of functions, I have developed implicit-SINDy, which combines a compact feature library, implicit formulation, and sparsity promoting non-convex optimization. The method successfully identifies models for metabolic and regulatory.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Mangan is currently an Assistant Professor position in Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University in 2018. Before coming to NU, she was an Acting Assistant Professor in the Applied Mathematics Department at the University of Washington, Seattle and Reseach Consultant at the Institute for Disease Modeling, Bellevue, WA. Besides developing model selection methods, Dr. Mangan works on spatial models for metabolism and bioengineering, and modeling of photovoltaics, lasers, and other materials systems.
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, February 21, 2018 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
University Academic Calendar
All Day
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Spring 2026 Commencement
Time
Sunday, June 14, 2026
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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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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
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University Academic Calendar
Fall 2026 Classes Begin
University Academic Calendar
All Day
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Fall 2026 Classes Begin
Time
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
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University Academic Calendar