Events
Past Event
WED@NICO WEBINAR: Susanna Manrubia, Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology (CSIC)
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
Details
Speaker:
Susanna Manrubia, Associate Professor, Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology (CSIC)
Title:
Evolutionary consequences of genotype spaces architecture: theoretical results and some empirical observations
Abstract:
Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece needed to update evolutionary theory. Though we are still far from achieving a complete picture of these relationships, our current understanding of simpler questions, such as the structure induced in the space of genotypes by sequences mapped to molecular structures (the so-called genotype-phenotype map), has revealed important facts that deeply affect the dynamical description of evolutionary processes. We will present computational and theoretical advances towards characterizing the networked structure of genotype spaces, briefly describe some dynamical implications for sequence populations, and present related empirical results.
Speaker Bio:
Susanna Manrubia studied physics at the Universitat de Barcelona, and received her doctoral degree in 1996. She was a Humboldt fellow of the Max Planck Society at the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin and a postdoctoral researcher at the MPI of Colloids and Interfaces in Golm. After several years at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, she is since 2014 associate professor of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the National Centre for Biotechnology (CSIC, Madrid). She focuses on developing theoretical and computational descriptions of biological phenomena, from the genome to large-scale evolution, and maintains close collaborations with experimentalists. Her interests include as well the emergence of cultural patterns and collective social behaviour. She has published over 130 peer reviewed articles and three books, was Section Editor for BMC Evolutionary Biology and is current member of the Editorial Board of Virus Evolution.
Webinar:
Video of this talk can be found on our YouTube Channel.
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. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 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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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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Calendar
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