Events
Past Event
Data Science Nights - FEBRUARY 2022 Meeting (Speaker: Emily Webber, Amazon)
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
5:30 PM
Details
FEBRUARY MEETING: Monday, February 28, 2022 at 5:30pm (US Central) via Zoom
DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly talks on data science techniques or applications, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Aspiring, beginning, and advanced data scientists are welcome!
ZOOM: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/7199764864
RSVP: https://forms.gle/RkAdfHHLCEKQPsqp8
AGENDA:
5:15 - 5:30 p.m. Meet & Greet
5:30 - 5:45 p.m. Talk by Emily Webber from Amazon
5:45 - 6:15 p.m. Extended Q&A
6:15 - 7:15 p.m. Meeting of people interested in taking on the organization of DSN for the future.
SPEAKER: Emily Webber, Senior Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
TITLE: A day in the life of the Amazon SageMaker (machine learning) team
ABSTRACT: Machine learning specialists at Amazon Web Services help customers make the best use of machine learning resources on the cloud to solve business challenges, improve operations, and promote innovation. Join us for a look at the exciting tools and interesting problems data scientists get to work with, in a talk by Senior Machine Learning Specialist, Emily Webber. We will also hear about Webber's path to becoming a data scientist, while keeping connected to academia and providing mentorship.
BIO: Emily Webber is currently a Senior Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She is also an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and a machine learning mentor at 1871, a startup incubator. Webber earned her MS from the University of Chicago in 2017, where she interned at Data Science for Social Good. Webber has worked for IssueVoter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and simMachines (ML software company). She is a keynote speaker at Amazon Web Services, and has a YouTube video channel on SageMaker with 150,000+ views.
YOU can make a difference at DSN
The graduate students and postdocs organizing Data Science Nights (DSN) are evaluating the possibility of expanding the types of events comprising DSN and determining the optimal frequency for different types of events. In order to best understand what the Northwestern community needs, we have prepared a short survey to guide our decision making. If you know anyone potentially interested in DSN, please share this survey with them. Thank you for taking the time to help improve DSN!
For more info: data-science-nights.org
Supporting Groups:
This event is supported by the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems and the Northwestern Data Science Initiative.
Thanks to our co-host in this talk, AI@NU!
Time
Monday, February 28, 2022 at 5:30 PM - 7:15 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
//
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