Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Jaline Gerardin, Feinberg School of Medicine "Mathematical modeling of malaria transmission to inform policy"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Jaline Gerardin, Assistant Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, and NICO Core Faculty Member
Title:
Mathematical modeling of malaria transmission to inform policy
Abstract:
In 2007, the global community issued a call to eradicate malaria. Twelve years later, much progress has been made, yet some countries are still struggling to reduce burden, and in others, elimination seems forever out of reach. Is eradication even possible with the currently available set of interventions? If so, how should interventions be combined and tailored to the local context to maximize their impact? And if not, what tools do we need to develop? Mathematical models of malaria transmission have been used to guide policy for decades. Malaria is a complex challenge, and accurately modeling its dynamics requires uniting observations across many disciplines, from entomology to immunology to demography, within a single framework. We present an introduction to the agent-based model EMOD and a few examples of application to product development and elimination strategy.
Speaker Bio:
Jaline Gerardin is Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine, a NICO member, and a member of the Center for Global Health at Northwestern. Her work has contributed to defining stratification metrics for intervention deployment and understanding the intervention mixes needed for malaria elimination across diverse endemic settings. Much of Jaline’s work has focused on the role of antimalarial drugs in malaria control and elimination, including case management, mass distribution campaigns, seasonal malaria chemoprevention, and reactive case detection, through quantitatively defining criteria such as coverage and timing necessary to maximize intervention impact. Prior to her appointment at Northwestern, Jaline was the malaria lead at the Institute for Disease Modeling. She received her PhD from University of California, San Francisco, in Biophysics.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, April 10, 2019 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
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
//
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
Details
Juneteenth - University Closed
Time
Friday, June 19, 2026
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar
Independence Day (observed) - University Closed
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
Independence Day (observed) - University Closed
Time
Friday, July 3, 2026
Contact
Calendar
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