Events
Past Event
WED@NICO WEBINAR: Hope Michelson, The University of Illinois "Negative returns explain failure to exploit temporal arbitrage by small farmers in low income countries"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
Details
Speaker:
Hope Michelson, Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, The University of Illinois
Title:
Negative returns explain failure to exploit temporal arbitrage by small farmers in low income countries
Abstract:
We propose a new explanation for the frequently observed “sell low, buy high” behavior among small farmers in developing countries: a substantial probability of negative returns to storage. We use 20 years of data from 732 markets in 23 countries to demonstrate that the lean-season price (the “high-price” season) fails to rise above the harvest-season price (the “low-price” season) 28.6% of the time. We show that aversion to these negative returns can induce households to forgo storage. Widespread policies to encourage small farmer storage may not be beneficial in all contexts. Authors: Lila Cardell and Hope Michelson
Speaker Bio:
Hope Michelson is an associate professor of development economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. She earned a PhD in applied economics from Cornell University, a MS in agricultural economics from UIUC, and a BA in literature and history from Georgetown University. She is a non-resident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Her research is at the intersection of development and agriculture. She focuses on small farmers in low income countries and on the relationships between agriculture, natural resources, markets, and household outcomes. She has a special interest in household poverty dynamics and food security at multiple spatial scales. Recent work has focused on small farmer market participation in low income countries: from transactions with traders in small local spot markets to small farmers contracting with multinationals including Walmart. Current projects are mostly in East and Southern Africa but she has also worked in Mexico, Nicaragua, and China.
Webinar:
Webinar link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/96241847919
Passcode: nico
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.
Time
Wednesday, November 18, 2020 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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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Juneteenth - University Closed
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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
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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