News & EventsDepartment Events & Announcements
Events
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Apr10
EVENT DETAILS
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In the US, unhealthy behaviors — such as sedentary lifestyle, overeating, substance use, and tobacco use — account for approximately 40% of the risk of premature deaths. While successful changes to these unhealthy behaviors can mitigate the risk of harm, behavior change is often difficult because of high self-management burden. Fortunately, mobile phones can reduce the burden of self-management because they can deliver the right intervention at the right time by using data-capture and computational capabilities of the phone.
Creating such just-in-time interventions, however, is a complex multi-disciplinary challenge. Mashfiqui Rabbi, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, works in two areas of just-in-time interventions. First, he designs new therapeutic interventions that use fine-grained mobile data and AI. These therapeutic interventions use novel computational algorithms and mobile data to dynamically personalize interventions to the individual in ways that were previously unachievable (e.g., relating treatments to one’s daily routine). Second, he works on engagement interventions, where the goal is to keep people engaged in frequent self-report both to collect data to advance science in behavior change as well as to provide individual states that cannot yet be sensed. Engagement interventions are critical in mobile health because most people stop using health apps after only a few days. In his talk, “Computational Interventions for Behavior Change,” Rabbi will present one novel therapeutic intervention and one engagement intervention. MyBehavior is a novel therapeutic intervention that provides personalized and low-burden suggestions to improve physical activity and dietary intake. SARA is an engagement intervention that optimizes timely incentives to increase the self-reporting of substance use data from a youth population. After discussing MyBehavior and SARA, Rabbi will outline his future plans to make more effective therapeutic/engagement interventions and his long-term vision of creating behavior change interventions for mental health.
Mashfiqui Rabbi is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where he works with Susan Murphy, professor of statistics and computer science. Prior to his postdoc, he earned a PhD in information science from Cornell University. For his thesis, he created the MyBehavior app, which is the first mobile recommender system to automatically generate personalized health feedback from mobile phone data. Rabbi’s work has been published in Ubicomp, Journal of Medical and Internet Research, and IEEE Pervasive Computing, and he has been featured in MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, The Economist, Mashable, and The New York Times. He has received several pilot grants from Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and Pennsylvania State University.TIME Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Brianna Mello brianna.mello@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science
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Jan14
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
January 14 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Heng Ji, UIUCTalk Title
Towards Creative IntelligenceAbstract
Human creative intelligence can be traced back at least 3.3 to 3.4 million years, as early humans used tools to manipulate their surroundings and, eventually, to create fire. Across both the macro- and microscopic worlds, we routinely look beyond surface appearances, break complex artifacts into their functional components, and recombine those components to create novel designs. For instance, if we want to design a new chair with built-in storage, we might add a component analogous to a drawer. Likewise, if a drug molecule lacks adequate solubility, we can pinpoint the substructures responsible for this limitation and replace them with more suitable building blocks. Unfortunately, while large language model (LLM)-based agents have greatly advanced analytical intelligence through problem solving, and simulation environments emphasize practical intelligence by testing the application of knowledge in realistic settings, creative intelligence (i.e., the ability to generate novel and useful ideas and solutions) remains a moonshot goal. In this talk, I will introduce a “decompose and reassemble” framework that enables large multimodal models to automatically break down real-world objects into distinctive, function-specific components and then use these components to perform fine-grained, compositional reasoning and generation. I will demonstrate how this framework supports the design of novel artifacts in the macro world and the creation of effective, synthesizable medicines in the micro world.Biography
Heng Ji is a Professor of Computer Science at Siebel School of Computing and Data Science of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the Co-Founder and CTO of Medicas AI, a company focusing on patient-centric AI for Drug Discovery. She is the Founding Director of Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE), and the Founding Director of CapitalOne-Illinois Center on AI Safety and Knowledge Systems (ASKS). She is a faculty member affiliated with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is named as an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Fellow in 2025 for her "significant contributions to information extraction, multimodal and multilingual knowledge extraction and AI for science." She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University under the supervision of the ACL Lifetime Achievement Awardee Prof. Ralph Grishman, and B.A. and M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University. The other awards she received include Outstanding Paper Award at ACL2024, two Outstanding Paper Awards at NAACL2024, "Young Scientist" by the World Laureates Association in 2023 and 2024, "Young Scientist" and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Computing by the World Economic Forum in 2016 and 2017, Amazon Scholar 2020-2025, "Women Leaders of Conversational AI" (Class of 2023) by Project Voice, "AI's 10 to Watch" Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, NSF CAREER award in 2009, PACLIC2012 Best paper runner-up, "Best of ICDM2013" paper award, "Best of SDM2013" paper award, ACL2018 Best Demo paper nomination, ACL2020 Best Demo Paper Award, NAACL2021 Best Demo Paper Award, Google Research Award in 2009 and 2014, IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012 and 2014 and Bosch Research Award in 2014-2018. She has given many keynote speeches at top conferences including IJCAI2025 and EMNLP2025. She was invited to testify to the U.S. House Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, & IT Committee as an AI expert in 2023. She was invited by the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and AFRL to join Air Force Data Analytics Expert Panel to inform the Air Force Strategy 2030, and invited to speak at the Federal Information Integrity R&D Interagency Working Group (IIRD IWG) briefing in 2023. She is the lead of many multi-institution projects and tasks, including the U.S. ARL projects on information fusion and knowledge networks construction, DARPA ECOLE MIRACLE team, DARPA KAIROS RESIN team and DARPA DEFT Tinker Bell team. She has coordinated the NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task 2010-2020. She served as the associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transaction on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and the Program Committee Co-Chair of many conferences including NAACL-HLT2018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022. She was elected as the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) secretary 2020-2023. Her research has been widely supported by the U.S. government agencies (DARPA, NSF, DoE, ARL, IARPA, AFRL, DHS) and industry (Amazon, CapitalOne, Adobe, IBM, Google, Bosch, Disney).TIME Wednesday, January 14, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Jan28
EVENT DETAILS
lessTBA
TIME Wednesday, January 28, 2026 at 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Jan29
EVENT DETAILS
lessCS Community! Join us for our monthly free bagels and coffee while mingling with fellow faculty and students.
TIME Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Feb2
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
February 2 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
TBATalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBA---
Zoom: TBA
Panopto: TBATIME Monday, February 2, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Feb25
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
February 25 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
TBATalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBA---
Zoom: TBA
Panopto: TBATIME Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Feb26
EVENT DETAILS
lessCS Community! Join us for our monthly free bagels and coffee while mingling with fellow faculty and students.
TIME Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)