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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  TIME Monday, January 5, 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)

• Apr

  6

  ME/CS/HCI Seminar- Faez Ahmed

  McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)

  3:00 PM 1-350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center

  EVENT DETAILS

  From Data to Design: Rethinking
  Engineering Design With Next-Gen AI

  BIO

  Faez Ahmed is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where he leads the DeCoDE Lab. His research focuses on AI for engineering design, including deep generative models, multimodal representations, and human–AI collaboration. His work has been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, ASME DAC and DTM Young Investigator Awards, the Google Research Scholar Award, and the Amazon Research Award. He serves as an Associate Editor for Computer-Aided Design and Design Science.

  ABSTRACT

  Generative AI is transforming how we create, customize, and accelerate digital content. Yet applying these tools to engineering design introduces unique challenges, from maintaining precision under evolving requirements to working effectively in data-scarce environments and interpreting designer intent. In this talk, I will discuss these challenges and show how emerging engineering-focused foundation models are beginning to address them, reshaping workflows in areas such as vehicle design, CAD automation, and design optimization. I will highlight new opportunities enabled by generative AI that integrates multimodal data with engineering analysis and optimization, and present examples of AI-driven design co-pilots for engineering tasks. The talk will conclude with a perspective on how AI enables us to broaden design democratization, accelerate innovation cycles, and fundamentally reshape the role of engineers.

  more less

  TIME Monday, April 6, 2026 at 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

  LOCATION 1-350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center    map it

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  CONTACT Jeremy Wells    jeremywells@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)

• Apr

  13

  CS Seminar: Arindam Banerjee

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

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

  EVENT DETAILS

  Monday / CS Seminar
  April 13 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Arindam Banerjee

  Talk Title
  TBA

  Abstract
  TBA

  Biography
  TBA

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  Panopto: TBA

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  TIME Monday, April 13, 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)

• Apr

  22

  CS Seminar: On the Hardness of Learning Regular Expressions (Lev Reyzin)

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

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

  EVENT DETAILS

  Wednesday / CS Seminar
  April 22 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Lev Reyzin, University of Illinois Chicago

  Talk Title
  On the Hardness of Learning Regular Expressions

  Abstract

  "Despite the theoretical significance and wide practical use of regular expressions, the computational complexity of learning them has been largely unexplored. We study the computational hardness of improperly learning regular expressions in the PAC model and with membership queries. We show that PAC learning is hard even under the uniform distribution on the hypercube, and also prove hardness of distribution-free learning with membership queries. Furthermore, if regular expressions are extended with complement or intersection, we establish hardness of learning with membership queries even under the uniform distribution. We emphasize that these results do not follow from existing hardness results for learning DFAs or NFAs, since the descriptive complexity of regular languages can differ exponentially between DFAs, NFAs, and regular expressions.

  This work is joint with Idan Attias, Nati Srebro, and Gal Vardi"

  Biography
  Lev Reyzin is a Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago and Co-Director of the IDEAL Institute. He works on the theory of machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence. Prior to UIC, Reyzin was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech and an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow at Yahoo! Research. Reyzin received his Ph.D. on an NSF doctoral fellowship from Yale under Dana Angluin and his bachelor’s degree from Princeton. He is currently the Chair of the Steering Committee for the ALT conference and the Editor-in-Chief of Mathematics of Data, Learning, and Intelligence. He has also served as a General Chair for FOCS 2024, the Program Chair for ISAIM 2020, and a Program Chair for ALT 2017. His work has earned awards at ICML, COLT, and AISTATS and has received extensive funding.

  Research Areas/Interests: theory of machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence

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  TIME Wednesday, April 22, 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)

• Apr

  27

  CS Seminar: Tushar Chandra

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

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

  EVENT DETAILS

  Monday / CS Seminar
  April 27 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Tushar Chandra

  Talk Title
  TBA

  Abstract
  TBA

  Biography
  TBA

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  Zoom: TBA
  Panopto: TBA

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  TIME Monday, April 27, 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)

• Apr

  29

  CS Seminar: Bill Fefferman

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

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

  EVENT DETAILS

  Wednesday / CS Seminar
  April 29 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Bill Fefferman

  Talk Title
  TBA

  Abstract
  TBA

  Biography
  TBA

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  Zoom: TBA
  Panopto: TBA

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  TIME Wednesday, April 29, 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)

• May

  4

  CS Seminar: Moon Duchin

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

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

  EVENT DETAILS

  Monday / CS Seminar
  May 4 / 12:00 PM
  Hybrid / Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Moon Duchin

  Talk Title
  TBA

  Abstract
  TBA

  Biography
  TBA

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  Zoom: TBA
  Panopto: TBA

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  TIME Monday, May 4, 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)