News & EventsDepartment Events & Announcements
Events
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Mar31
EVENT DETAILS
lessSpring Break Ends
TIME Monday, March 31, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Apr2
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
April 2nd / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Yevgeniy (Eugene) VorobeychikTalk Title
Achieving AI Safety in a Contested WorldAbstract
"As the increasing capabilities of AI-enabled systems have led to broad deployment across diverse applications ranging from conversational agents to self-driving cars, safety considerations have come to be central to the current research agenda. However, the very meaning of safety has come to be broad and in some cases contested. For example, there may be responses to conversational prompts that some may deem neutral, while others offensive, or autonomous driving behaviors that some may view as efficient while others perceive them as dangerously aggressive. A useful way to conceptualize safety considerations is to divide these into two categories: objective and subjective. The former (for example, running over a pedestrian) is not reasonable contested, while the latter (for example, how aggressively a self-driving car should merge onto a freeway) can admit a range of legitimate perspectives.
In this talk, I will present our recent work tackling both objective and subjective safety considerations. On the former, I will present learning-based approaches for synthesizing provably stable and safe neural network controllers in known dynamical systems, combining gradient-based methods for both synthesis and verification with ideas from curriculum learning. Further, I will briefly discuss our recent work that facilitates safety specifications that combine natural language with formal logic, in which we combine LLMs with conformal prediction to obtain provably correct plans. For the latter, I will discuss an axiomatic framework for preference learning that accounts for disagreement in safety preferences, as well as a novel approach for reinforcement learning with diverse task (e.g., safety) specifications that achieves provable performance guarantees and state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot and few-shot settings."
Biography
Yevgeniy Vorobeychik is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in Saint Louis. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. Between 2008 and 2010 he was a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Pennsylvania Computer and Information Science department. He received Ph.D. (2008) and M.S.E. (2004) degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University. His work focuses on game theoretic modeling of security and privacy, adversarial machine learning, algorithmic and behavioral game theory and incentive design, optimization, agent-based modeling, complex systems, network science, and epidemic control. Dr. Vorobeychik received an NSF CAREER award in 2017, and was invited to give an IJCAI-16 early career spotlight talk. He also received several Best Paper awards, including one of 2017 Best Papers in Health Informatics. He was nominated for the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and received honorable mention for the 2008 IFAAMAS Distinguished Dissertation Award.Research/Interest Areas
ML, game theory
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Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98890454611?pwd=MIBSzucB4F5Cm1d8tVCCfTMbDhrFbu.1
Panopto: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=d10d65da-87eb-4f36-9e46-b2a601452849TIME Wednesday, April 2, 2025 at 1:00 PM - 2:00 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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Apr3
EVENT DETAILS
lessJoin us for a poster session highlighting the incredible work of students in the Computer Science Research Track Program over the fall and winter quarters!
Learn more about the Research Track Program here: Research Track Program
TIME Thursday, April 3, 2025 at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Bella Barrios marbella.barrios@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Jun15
TIME Sunday, June 15, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Jun16
EVENT DETAILS
lessMcCormick School of Engineering PhD Hooding and Master's Degree Recognition Ceremony. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.
TIME Monday, June 16, 2025 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 2705 Ashland Ave
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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Jun16
EVENT DETAILSmore info
lessMcCormick School of Engineering Undergraduate Convocation. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.
TIME Monday, June 16, 2025 at 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
LOCATION 2705 Ashland Ave
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science