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Department Events & Announcements

Events

• Nov

  28

  CS Distinguished Seminar: "Delphic Costs and Benefits in Web Search: A utilitarian & historical analysis" Andrei Broder, Google

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  12:00 PM

  EVENT DETAILS

  Monday / CS Seminar
  November 28th / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Title: Delphic Costs and Benefits in Web Search: A utilitarian & historical analysis

  Speaker: Andrei Broder, Google

  Zoom Link

  Live Stream

  Abstract:

  Web search engines are widely perceived as "free." But search is not effortless: in reality there are many intermingled non-monetary costs (e.g. time costs, cognitive costs, interactivity costs, etc.) and the benefits may be marred by various impairments, such as misunderstanding and misinformation. This characterization of costs and benefits appears to be inherent to the human search for information; most of the costs and impairments can be identified in interactions with any web search engine, interactions with public libraries, and even in interactions with ancient oracles. To emphasize this innate connection, we call these costs and benefits Delphic, in contrast to explicitly financial costs and benefits. Our main thesis is that users' satisfaction with a search engine mostly depends on their experience of Delphic cost and benefits, in other words on their utility. The consumer utility is correlated with classic measures of search engine quality, such as ranking, precision, recall, etc., but is not completely determined by them. To argue our thesis, we catalog the Delphic costs and benefits and show how the development of search engines over the last quarter century was driven to a large extent by the quest of decreasing Delphic costs and increasing Delphic benefits. This is joint work with Preston McAfee.

  Biography:
  Andrei Broder is a Distinguished Scientist in Google Research. His current interests are centered on the analysis of emergent web-based ecosystems. Before joining Google he was a Fellow and VP for Computational Advertising at Yahoo. Previous positions include VP for Research and Chief Scientist at AltaVista and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford under Don Knuth. Broder has authored more than a hundred papers and was awarded over fifty US patents. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM and of IEEE, and a member of the ACM SIGIR Academy. He was awarded the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award twice: in 2012 for his work on Min-Hashing and in 2020 for his work on the "Power of Two Choices".

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  TIME Monday, November 28, 2022 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

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  CONTACT Wynante R Charles    wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Jun

  5

  Jiahao Yu CS PhD Final Defense: Advancing Cybersecurity through Explainable AI

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  9:00 AM

  EVENT DETAILS

  There is growing momentum—from industry, government, and academia—to use AI for automating cybersecurity tasks. Yet practitioners remain skeptical: while 87% of security leaders expect AI to enhance their roles, only 9% believe it will replace significant parts of them. This gap stems from two fundamental barriers: limited capability and lack of trust. In this talk, I present my research on addressing these barriers through explainable AI. I first introduce StateMask, a method that automatically identifies critical decision steps in AI agent trajectories, enabling security professionals to understand why an AI-generated patch succeeded or failed. A user study with 41 experienced developers shows that 89% find our explanations aligned with their reasoning. I then present GPO, which leverages these explanations to synthesize high-quality training data without expensive expert annotation, thereby improving model capability. GPO-trained open-source models achieve performance competitive with leading commercial models on vulnerability patching, and its extension, EntroPO, ranks 1st on SWE-Bench Lite among all open-weight models. I conclude by discussing future directions toward building AI systems that are robust to imperfect data, trusted by security professionals, and capable of tackling real-world cybersecurity challenges.

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  TIME Friday, June 5, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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  CONTACT Jensen Smith    jensen.smith@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Jun

  12

  CSSI End of Year BBQ

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  5:00 PM

  EVENT DETAILS

  Hi CS++ PhD students, faculty, staff, post-docs,

  We will be hosting a BBQ to celebrate the end of this academic year!

  When? Friday, June 12, 5-7 pm
  Where? North side of Evanston Centennial park

  We will be cooking up American BBQ classics with plenty of snacks and cold drinks to go around (vegetarian and vegan food included).

  RSVP HERE

  Please RSVP by 5 pm on Thursday, June 11, so we can prepare enough food for everyone.

  We have an RSVP list so that folks (signed in) can see who else is going. If you don’t see a friend or labmate signed up, make sure to reach out and invite them!

  Looking forward to seeing y’all there!

  Tommy, Ziyang, Yuchen, Maojiang, Alex, Melissa on behalf of CSSI

  Register Now

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  TIME Friday, June 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

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  CONTACT Computer Science Social Initiative    cssi@U.NORTHWESTERN.EDU EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Jun

  15

  Northwestern Engineering PhD Hooding and Master's Degree Recognition Ceremony

  McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

  9:00 AM

  EVENT DETAILS

  McCormick School of Engineering PhD Hooding and Master's Degree Recognition Ceremony. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.

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  TIME Monday, June 15, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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  CONTACT Andi Joppie    andi.joppie@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

• Jun

  15

  Northwestern Engineering Undergraduate Convocation

  McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

  2:00 PM

  EVENT DETAILS

  McCormick School of Engineering Undergraduate Convocation. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.

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  TIME Monday, June 15, 2026 at 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

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  CONTACT Andi Joppie    andi.joppie@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science