News & Events

Department Events & Announcements

Events

• Jan

  5

  CS Seminar: Seeing Like a Language Model (Ari Holtzman)

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  12:00 PM 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

  EVENT DETAILS

  Monday / CS Seminar
  January 5 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Ari Holtzman, University of Chicago

  Talk Title
  Seeing Like a Language Model

  Abstract
  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

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  Zoom Link
  Panopto Link

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  TIME Monday, January 5, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

  LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)    map it

  ADD TO CALENDAR

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Dec

  13

  Northwestern Engineering PhD Hooding and Master's Recognition Ceremony

  McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

  4:00 PM Pick-Staiger Concert Hall

  EVENT DETAILS

  The ceremony will take place on Saturday, December 13 in Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, 50 Arts Circle Drive.

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  TIME Saturday, December 13, 2025 at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

  LOCATION Pick-Staiger Concert Hall    map it

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  CONTACT Andi Joppie    andi.joppie@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

• Jan

  12

  CS Seminar:Data-Driven Neural Mesh Editing – without 3D Data (Rana Hanocka)

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  12:00 PM 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

  EVENT DETAILS

  Monday / CS Seminar
  January 12 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Rana Hanocka, UChicago

  Talk Title
  Data-Driven Neural Mesh Editing – without 3D Data

  Abstract
  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

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  Zoom Link
  Panopto Link

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  TIME Monday, January 12, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

  LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)    map it

  ADD TO CALENDAR

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Jan

  14

  CS Seminar: Heng Ji

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  12:00 PM 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

  EVENT DETAILS

  Wednesday / CS Seminar
  January 14 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Heng Ji, UIUC

  Talk Title
  TBA

  Abstract
  TBA

  Biography
  TBA

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  Zoom: TBA
  Panopto: TBA

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  TIME Wednesday, January 14, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

  LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)    map it

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Jan

  28

  Public Lecture Series

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  4:00 PM

  EVENT DETAILS

  TBA

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  TIME Wednesday, January 28, 2026 at 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

  ADD TO CALENDAR

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Jan

  29

  Bagel Thursday

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  9:00 AM 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

  EVENT DETAILS

  CS Community! Join us for our monthly free bagels and coffee while mingling with fellow faculty and students.

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  TIME Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

  LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)    map it

  ADD TO CALENDAR

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Feb

  2

  CS Seminar

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  12:00 PM 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

  EVENT DETAILS

  Monday / CS Seminar
  February 2 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  TBA

  Talk Title
  TBA

  Abstract
  TBA

  Biography
  TBA

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  Zoom: TBA
  Panopto: TBA

  more less

  TIME Monday, February 2, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

  LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)    map it

  ADD TO CALENDAR

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Feb

  25

  CS Seminar

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  12:00 PM 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

  EVENT DETAILS

  Wednesday / CS Seminar
  February 25 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  TBA

  Talk Title
  TBA

  Abstract
  TBA

  Biography
  TBA

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  Zoom: TBA
  Panopto: TBA

  more less

  TIME Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

  LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)    map it

  ADD TO CALENDAR

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Feb

  26

  Bagel Thursday

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  9:00 AM 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

  EVENT DETAILS

  CS Community! Join us for our monthly free bagels and coffee while mingling with fellow faculty and students.

  more less

  TIME Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

  LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)    map it

  ADD TO CALENDAR

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

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)