Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars and Fellows
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
NICO LIGHTNING TALKS are open to Northwestern graduate student or postdoctoral fellows! If you are interested in giving a lightning talk (~10 minutes with questions) to the broader NICO audience, please fill out this short survey: https://forms.gle/vB4zc6cWoD2GihWB8. We will host our next session in Fall 2022.
Spring Speakers:
Lluc Font - Visiting PhD Student
McCormick School of Engineering
“Information-theoretic analysis of judicial decisions to reveal socially disruptive periods and topics”
Laws and legal decision-making regulate how societies function. Therefore, they evolve and adapt to new social paradigms and reflect changes in culture and social norms, and are a good proxy for the evolution of socially sensitive issues. Here, we propose an information-theoretic methodology to quantitatively track global trends and shifts in the evolution of large corpora of judicial decisions, and thus to detect periods in which disruptive topics arise.
Binglu Wang - PhD Student
Kellogg School of Management
Quantifying the dynamics of innovation abandonment across scientific, technological, commercial, and pharmacological domains”
Understanding the dynamics of innovation abandonment is essential for a deeper understanding of the innovation lifecyle. Here, we analyze four large-scale datasets that capture the dynamics of the innovation lifecycle from adoption to abandonment in diverse contexts: 2.6M scientists, 0.5M inventors, 3.5M consumers, and 5313 pharmaceutical organizations. We find that at a macro level, the abandoning probability of individuals or organizations increases with time, influencing the overall popularity dynamics. Yet beneath this macro trend lies a simple effect of preferential abandonment, governed by the underlying network in which abandonment unfolds. We find that this simple effect creates complex dynamics in how the underlying ecosystem disintegrates, generating a novel structural collapse in networked systems perceived as robust against random abandonments. Together these results demonstrate that the dynamics of innovation abandonment follow simple and reproducible patterns with direct implications for the structural properties of the underlying system. These results not only deepen our quantitative understanding of networked social systems, but also have implications for retaining user communities and protecting the integrity of ecosystems, suggesting that preferential abandonment may be a generic property within the innovation lifecycle.
Jorin Graham - PhD Student
Department of Physics
“Correlated dynamics enhanced by uncorrelated noise in coupled systems”
Synchronization arises in a wide variety of contexts, including physical systems – such as arrays of Josephson junctions, laser arrays, and power grids – and biological systems – such as ecosystems, circadian clocks, and cardiac pacemakers. These systems are embedded in environments whose influence can promote or disrupt synchronization. For example, correlated environmental noise often enhances synchronization, as it allows the system to inherit order from the environment. Recently, it has been shown that for coupled nonlinear oscillators, uncorrelated noise can in fact enhance synchronization better than correlated noise (Nicolaou et al., PRL 2020). In this presentation, I will show that a similar phenomenon arises even in the simplest coupled systems: systems that are linear and linearly coupled.
Moh Hosseinioun- Research Fellow
Kellogg School of Management
“Unpacking human capital using occupational skills”
How do we become more valuable workers? We invest in education and training to acquire skills, knowledge, and abilities that make us better at what we do. However, the acquisition of skills is not a series of independent events but is rather cumulative and interdependent among previous attainments. Certain skills are foundations for others— such as arithmetic for calculus— while there are skills like bodily coordination and orientation that can be mastered relatively independently. We ask whether such interdependencies determine the value of skills by analyzing skills' usage distributions across occupations.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92960926949
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, April 27, 2022 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Daniel Stouffer, Leibniz Institute "Conceptual and Theoretical Challenges in the Study of Multi-Species Coexistence"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Daniel B. Stouffer, Research Group Leader, Department of Evolutionary and Integrative Ecology, the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin, Germany
Title:
Conceptual and Theoretical Challenges in the Study of Multi-Species Coexistence
Abstract:
The population dynamics of most ecological communities unfold on temporal scales that cannot be fully studied in the laboratory or field. The generation times of trees, for example, are so long and varied that we may need to wait decades to determine how a whole, interconnected forest community responds to a changing climate. Many researchers thus use models to generate predictions that go beyond the bounds of what is experimentally tractable. To do so, it has become common to follow the "model-paramerisation paradigm". For example, a researcher interested in forest dynamics would not conduct long-term experiments to directly probe whether one tree species is ever competitively excluded by any other(s). Instead, they would use data from shorter-term experiments to estimate the parameters of a presupposed model, and then study whether or not their empirically parameterised model predicts competitive exclusion or coexistence. As powerful as this perspective has proven to be, it routinely hinges on multiple key assumptions that limit its versatility. I will describe recent and ongoing work that challenges these assumptions, while also describing some unexpected hurdles encountered along the way.
Speaker Bio:
Daniel B. Stouffer is a Research Group Leader in the Department of Evolutionary and Integrative Ecology at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin, Germany. His group adopts a variety of computational, statistical, and analytical approaches to overcome ecological communities' innate complexity while exploring fundamental biological questions. They work on a variety of topics and systems and are particularly interested in understanding the emergent ecological and evolutionary consequences that arise due to interactions between species.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98364690035
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. 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, May 6, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Hamsa Bastani, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania "Challenges in Achieving Human-AI Collaboration"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Hamsa Bastani, Associate Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions, and Statistics and Data Science, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Title:
Challenges in Achieving Human-AI Collaboration
Abstract:
TBA
Speaker Bio:
Hamsa Sridhar Bastani is an Associate Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions (OID) and Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she co-direct the Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab. Her research sits at the intersection of machine learning, operations research, and economics. She studies how to design, deploy, and evaluate AI systems that empower human decision-makers and improve societal outcomes.
Professor Bastani aims to combine methodological depth with implementation in consequential environments. She has worked with national governments to deploy algorithms at the country scale for targeted border COVID-19 screening and essential medicine access, and has co-led one of the first large field studies of generative AI tutors in high school mathematics. She studies both the mathematical properties of algorithms and the way people respond to them.
Her research has been published in leading outlets including Nature, Management Science, Operations Research, and PNAS, and has garnered numerous recognitions, including the Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research, the INFORMS Pierskalla Award for best healthcare paper, and the George Nicholson Prize. Previously, she graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 2012 with an A.M. in physics and an A.B. in physics and mathematics, completed her PhD in Stanford's Electrical Engineering department under the supervision of Mohsen Bayati, and spent a year as a Herman Goldstine postdoctoral fellow at IBM Research.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/99847338986
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. 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, May 13, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks with NU Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
NICO is looking for participants to share 12-15 minute lightning talks on their current research. To sign up, please fill out this short survey. These are open to Northwestern graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars!
All talks will be given in person at Chambers Hall and this event will also be livestreamed via Zoom.
Speakers will be balanced based on their topics/disciplines in order to provide a broad representation of the research activities at NICO
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98031689779
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. 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, May 20, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)