Events
Past Event
WED@NICO WEBINAR: Fabiana Zollo, Ca' Foscari University of Venice "Polarization, Misinformation, and Hate: Investigating Social Dynamics with Online Data"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
Details
Speaker:
Fabiana Zollo, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Title:
Polarization, Misinformation, and Hate: Investigating Social Dynamics with Online Data
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenge of conveying and communicating complexity and uncertainty to the public, also given the increasing central role of the Internet and social media. Designed to maximise users' presence on the platform and to deliver targeted advertising, social media transformed the information landscape and have rapidly become the main information sources for many of their users. Information spreads faster and farther online, in a flow-through system where users have immediate access to unlimited content. This may facilitate the proliferation of mis- and dis-information, generating chaos, and limiting access to correct information. In this talk, I will provide an overview of how social dynamics and behavioural patterns can be investigated and analysed with online data, and discuss how data-driven insights can be used to design effective strategies to counter misinformation and improve the overall quality of the information system.
Speaker Bio:
Fabiana Zollo is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics and Research Fellow in the Center for the Humanities & Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research investigates information and misinformation spreading, social dynamics, and the emergence of collective narratives on online social media. She collected several papers on this topic, with both national and International co-authors. Since 2019, she is serving as an External Expert to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). She is a member of the Task Force “Data Science” established by AGCOM, the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority, and a member of the Working Group established by the Italian Presidency of Council to study the phenomenon of disinformation on COVID-19.
Webinar:
https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92493487525
Passcode: NICO2022
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 9, 2022 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)