Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Keara Lane, NU Molecular Biosciences "Single-cell decision making during bacterial infection"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Keara Lane - Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
Single-cell decision making during bacterial infection: lessons from innate immunity
Abstract:
Bacterial infections are dynamic and heterogeneous, yet we have primarily relied on population-level snapshots to understand them. For this seminar, I will primarily talk about my postdoctoral research which focused on understanding the role of cell-to-cell variation in innate immune signaling dynamics during bacterial infection. First, I will discuss work linking NF-κB dynamics to single-cell gene expression patterns and second, how signaling dynamics are used by macrophages to transmit information about the threat associated with a given bacterial stimulus. I will wrap up with an outline of the current focus of the Lane lab, namely cell-cell communication dynamics during host-pathogen interaction.
Speaker Bio:
Keara Lane is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern. Keara completed her PhD with Tyler Jacks at MIT followed by postdoctoral research in systems biology with Markus Covert at Stanford. Her lab explores the time dimension, or dynamics, of bacterial infection in individual cells. The Lane lab takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating live-cell microscopy with global single-cell profiling technologies to make quantitative, dynamic, single-cell measurements during bacterial infection. The goal of the lab is to determine how decisions made in individual host and bacterial cells influence infection outcome, with a view to identifying novel strategies to engineer cellular behavior to control infection outcome.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, October 30, 2019 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
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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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