Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Amanda Melin, University of Calgary "Plasticity and adaptation of capuchin monkeys examined through behaviour, microbes, and genes"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
1120, Kellogg Global Hub
Details
Speaker:
Amanda Melin - Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of Calgary
Title:
Plasticity and adaptation of capuchin monkeys examined through behaviour, microbes, and genes
Abstract:
Adaptation to changing environments shapes the genetic and phenotypic diversity of organisms over evolutionary time. Animals also face changing environments throughout the course of their lifetime, and plasticity in behaviours, gene expression, and microbes helps them survive these short-term shifts. In my talk, I discuss adaptation and plasticity in a highly flexible, long-lived, social primate, the capuchin monkey. I introduce several of our collaborative field and lab studies, which integrate 40 years of behavioural and demographic study of white-faced capuchins (Cebus imitator) in Sector Santa Rosa, Costa Rica, with recent genomics analyses of capuchins and their gut microbiomes. This includes analysis across seasons, years, populations, and in comparative context with other mammalian species. By using different approaches and tools that span behavioural ecology, demography, and the ‘omics of hosts and their commensal organisms, we can better understand how adaptation and plasticity have shaped the form and function of our close relatives, and generate new insight into the forces shaping our own evolutionary history and present-day variation.
Speaker Bio:
Amanda Melin's lab is involved in a broad range of research situated at the intersection of behaviour, sensory ecology, and dietary outcomes of nonhuman and human primates. We take an integrative approach to answering questions about primate origins and evolution, melding study of sensory systems with molecular ecology, microbiome analysis, metagenomics and field observations of primates.
Location:
Note we are meeting in a different location this week:
In person: Kellogg Global Hub, 2211 Campus Drive, Room 1120
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95713083124
Passcode: NICO22
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, November 16, 2022 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
1120, Kellogg Global Hub Map
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