News & EventsDepartment Events & Announcements
Events
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Oct15
EVENT DETAILS
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Wednesday / CS Seminar
October 15th / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Jason Hartline, Northwestern UniversityTalk Title
Scoring Rules for a Theory of AIAbstract
Scoring rules are foundational in decision theory and, therefore, are foundational for a developing theory of artificial intelligence. Just as simple models from decision theory provide context for understanding the decisions of complex humans, so too can they for complex AI systems. Bayesian decision theory considers an agent receiving a signal that is correlated with the state, choosing an action, and obtaining a payoff that depends on both the state and action. With Bayesian updating and the revelation principle, the signal becomes a posterior belief and the decision problem becomes a scoring rule. Given a scoring rule, baseline performance is the optimal score under the prior; benchmark performance is the optimal score under the posterior; and the optimal scoring rule — framed as a mechanism design problem — maximizes the difference between them. The talk reviews this theory and applies it to evaluate the value of information, the losses from predictive models, and the accuracy of human and AI decision makers.Biography
"Prof. Hartline’s research introduces design and analysis methodologies from computer science to understand and improve outcomes of economic, legal, and AI systems. Optimal behavior and outcomes in complex environments are complex and, therefore, should not be expected; instead, the theory of approximation can show that simple and natural behaviors are approximately optimal in complex environments. This approach is applied to auction theory and mechanism design in his graduate textbook Mechanism Design and Approximation which is under preparation.
Prof. Hartline received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Washington under the supervision of Anna Karlin. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Avrim Blum; and subsequently a researcher at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley. He joined Northwestern University in 2008 where he is a professor of computer science. He was on sabbatical at Harvard University in the Economics Department during the 2014 calendar year and visiting Microsoft Research, New England for the Spring of 2015. He was on sabbatical at Stanford University for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Prof. Hartline is the director of Northwestern’s Online Markets Lab, he was a founding codirector of the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning from 2019-2022, and is a cofounder of virtual conference organizing platform Virtual Chair."
TIME Wednesday, October 15, 2025 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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Jan5
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
January 5 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Ari Holtzman, University of ChicagoTalk Title
Seeing Like a Language ModelAbstract
How does a language model perceive its input? What aspects of reality does it find legible and which elude it? How can we know? Current approaches to studying LLMs—focused on engineering progress—are insufficiently exploratory. I will discuss some projects touching on various aspects of LLMs: Absence Blindness, the localization of memories, and more sensitivity to subtle social signaling. I will discuss what it means for interpretability approaches to be predictive rather than mechanistic, defend prompting as a form of scientific inquiry, and caution against formalizing concepts too early, without doing the required amount of stamp collecting. Along the way I’ll make the case that AI has been given a new mandate—to articulate the ineffable, by describing aspects of communication and computation that we previously had no words for because they were stuck too deep inside human cognition to be easily referenced.Biography
Ari Holtzman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at the University of Chicago where he runs Conceptualization Lab. His lab's motto is 'Untangling the ineffable.' because he believes one of the primary purposes of all human endeavor is to create new vocabulary to help articulate the world more clearly. His research focuses on generative models of language, including contributions like Nucleus Sampling and work on understanding what language models are actually doing and how they perceive the world. Ari completed his PhD at the University of Washington, where he won the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award and was part of the team that won the inaugural Amazon Alexa Prize in 2017.Research Area(s)/Interests: LLMs, Machine Communication, AI Driven Narrative Art
TIME Monday, January 5, 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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Jan12
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
January 12 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Rana Hanocka, UChicagoTalk Title
Data-Driven Neural Mesh Editing – without 3D DataAbstract
Much of the current success of deep learning has been driven by massive amounts of curated data, whether annotated or unannotated. Compared to image datasets, developing large-scale 3D datasets is either prohibitively expensive or impractical. In this talk, I will present several works that harness the power of data-driven deep learning for tasks in shape editing and processing, without any 3D datasets. I will discuss works that learn to synthesize and analyze 3D geometry using large image datasets.Biography
Rana Hanocka is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and holds a courtesy appointment at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). She founded and directs the 3DL (Threedle) research collective, comprised of enthusiastic researchers passionate about 3D, machine learning, and visual computing. Her research interests span computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning. She completed her Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Daniel Cohen-Or and Raja Giryes. Her Ph.D. research focused on building neural networks for irregular 3D data and applying them to problems in geometry processing.Research Interests: Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
TIME Monday, January 12, 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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Jan14
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
January 14 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Heng Ji, UIUCTalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBA---
Zoom: TBA
Panopto: TBATIME 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)