News & EventsDepartment Events & Announcements
Events
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Mar4
EVENT DETAILS
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The increasing scale and complexity of modern software have led to a surge in security vulnerabilities, outpacing the ability of developers to provide timely repairs. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed advancements in Automated Vulnerability Repair (AVR), existing approaches often struggle in real-world settings due to an over-reliance on idealized assumptions, such as perfect fault localization and patch validation methodologies. This dissertation addresses these gaps by developing autonomous, LLM-based systems designed to navigate the end-to-end complexities of the repair process, including 0-day vulnerability mitigation, legacy system maintenance, and rigorous correctness evaluation.
To improve the practicality of AVR, we first introduce PatchAgent, an autonomous agent that integrates fault localization, patch generation, and patch validation. By utilizing a language server and interaction optimization, it mimics human-like reasoning to repair vulnerabilities triggered by proof-of-concept (PoC) inputs, achieving a 90% success rate on real-world datasets. Extending these capabilities to 1-day vulnerabilities, we present PortGPT, a system designed to automate patch backporting for large-scale projects like the Linux kernel. By autonomously navigating Git history and refining patches based on compiler feedback, PortGPT demonstrates high efficacy in migrating security fixes to older software branches, with several generated patches successfully merged into the Linux mainline.
Finally, to address the lack of reliable evaluation standards in the field, we present PVBench, a benchmark designed for the rigorous assessment of patch correctness. Our analysis reveals that existing AVR systems frequently produce "overfitted" patches that pass basic tests but fail to capture the original developer's intent or the true root cause of the vulnerability. By introducing PoC+ tests that encode complex semantic requirements, we demonstrate that current success rates are often significantly overestimated. Collectively, this work provides a comprehensive framework for building and evaluating AVR systems that are robust, autonomous, and applicable to the demands of real-world software maintenance.
TIME Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 10:30 AM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Jensen Smith jensen.smith@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr16
EVENT DETAILS
lessTitle: Speed Predictions for Online Energy-Efficient Scheduling
Abstract: We consider the scheduling problem of online speed scaling where the goal is to minimize the energy consumption of a machine that controls the speed at which jobs are processed. Recent work has leveraged the learning-augmented framework, where the algorithm is provided with predictions about jobs that will arrive in the future, to manage power usage more efficiently.We propose a novelprediction model for speed scaling where the predictions are about the machine speed (the output), instead of the jobs (the input). Machine speed predictions have multiple advantages. They are succinct and do not require knowledge of all the parameters of all the jobs. They can be provided dynamically, which allows them to incorporate data observed at runtime, instead of being provided up front. Finally, they lead to a natural definition of smoothness that does not require defining a measure of the prediction error.
We give an algorithm for dynamic machine speed predictions that is $(1+\epsilon)$-consistent and $O(1)$-robust. For offline machine speed predictions and job speed predictions, we provide an algorithm that achieves the stronger guarantee of $(1+\epsilon)$-smoothness, while maintaining $O(1)$-robustness. These guarantees are comparable to previous work on speed scaling with predictions, but without having to predict the entire input.
TIME Thursday, April 16, 2026 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Bob Guo BobGuo2023@u.northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr17
EVENT DETAILS
lessJoin us at the upcoming Tech Talk Career Panel with Northwestern CS Alumni industry leaders! Engage in conversation as they share their career journeys, industry insights, and advice for after graduation. Learn about diverse career paths, ask your questions, and gain real-world perspectives from those who’ve been where you are.
Featuring panelists: Jiahui Liu, Hui Ding, and Sanjay Sood. See below for details.
TIME Friday, April 17, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Bella Barrios marbella.barrios@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr20
EVENT DETAILS
lessYou are warmly invited to come observe the teaching of your colleagues to get ideas for yourself.
TIME Monday, April 20, 2026
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr20
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / Student Seminar
April 20 / 12:00 PM
Mudd 3514Speaker: Yuanyang Teng
Title: Access Is Not Enough: Toward Developmental Flourishing in Assistive Technology
Abstract: Technical accessibility research has made significant progress by focusing on the “access” frame: enabling users with disabilities to complete tasks and achieve outcomes comparable to those without disabilities. However, this framing often prioritizes task completion over the process of doing and being. In this talk, I propose a new frame: developmental flourishing. “Developmental flourishing” positions assistive technologies not as end goals, but as means for exploratory, creative, sensemaking, and meaning-making processes that give activities their depth and personal significance. Technologies should expand capabilities that are valuable and authentic to individuals, aligning and augmenting their unique cognitive processes and strategies. Adopting this perspective suggests several system-level shifts: designing interfaces as cognitive representations, treating embodiment as a communicative resource, and building systems that evolve through use. These shifts have implications for interaction design, sensory feedback, and adaptive system architectures. I conclude by outlining open technical questions and inviting discussion on how computer systems might more fully incorporate process-oriented paradigms into accessibility research.
Bio: Yuanyang (YY) Teng is an HCI researcher and architect bridging design, technology, and the social sciences. They are a PhD student in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University, a dual-degree program in Computer Science and Communication. YY works in the CollabLab, advised by Dr. Darren Gergle. Their research asks what assistive technologies could become if designed around people's unique cognitive processes rather than around prescribed tasks and anticipated outcomes, developing theoretical frameworks and technological paradigm shifts that center diverse perceptual processes and cognitive strategies in assistive technology development. They hold an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University, where they completed a thesis in HCI and spent three years doing research with the Columbia HCI labs and Snap's HCI research group. Before that, they practiced architecture for five years at Meier Partners, the firm behind the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and remained a licensed Architect in New York State. They also hold a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute.
TIME Monday, April 20, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Chang Wang wc@u.northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr21
EVENT DETAILS
lessYou are warmly invited to come observe the teaching of your colleagues to get ideas for yourself.
TIME Tuesday, April 21, 2026
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr22
EVENT DETAILS
lessYou are warmly invited to come observe the teaching of your colleagues to get ideas for yourself.
TIME Wednesday, April 22, 2026
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr22
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
April 22 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Lev Reyzin, University of Illinois ChicagoTalk Title
On the Hardness of Learning Regular ExpressionsAbstract
"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
TIME Wednesday, April 22, 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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Apr23
EVENT DETAILS
lessYou are warmly invited to come observe the teaching of your colleagues to get ideas for yourself.
TIME Thursday, April 23, 2026
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr23
EVENT DETAILS
lessThe legal system is built upon complex bodies of written text that function as operative rules governing rights, obligations, and outcomes. Recent advances in natural language processing have created new opportunities to automate aspects of legal analysis using language models (LMs). However, these models remain fundamentally probabilistic systems optimized for statistical prediction rather than faithful rule application. As a result, they often generate fluent legal language while failing to perform the precise, multi-step reasoning required to correctly interpret and apply legal rules. This dissertation investigates how language models can be improved and rigorously evaluated as legal reasoners through the integration of symbolic representations and methods grounded in legal domain knowledge.
Focusing on a tractable subset of legal tasks termed computational legal reasoning, this work develops neurosymbolic approaches that structure legal interpretation, rule application, and evaluation. First, it introduces a system for transforming natural language contracts into machine-readable representations through the extraction of Obligation Logic Graphs (OLGs), enabling contractual obligations to be represented as structured logical relationships and translated into executable code. Second, it presents Chain of Logic, a prompting method designed to improve rule-based reasoning in language models by decomposing compositional rules into their constituent elements before recombining the results to reach a final conclusion. Third, it introduces OpenExempt, a dynamic framework and benchmark that generates natural language legal tasks and their solutions from expert-crafted encodings of statutes and case facts, enabling fine-grained diagnostic evaluation of model behavior across controlled variations in reasoning complexity and task structure. Together, these contributions advance the study of language models as legal reasoners by introducing methods that improve interpretability, reliability, and diagnostic evaluation.
TIME Thursday, April 23, 2026 at 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM
LOCATION 3501, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Jensen Smith jensen.smith@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr24
EVENT DETAILS
lessYou are warmly invited to come observe the teaching of your colleagues to get ideas for yourself.
TIME Friday, April 24, 2026
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Apr27
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
April 27 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Tushar ChandraTalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBA---
Zoom: TBA
Panopto: TBATIME Monday, April 27, 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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Apr29
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
April 29 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Bill Fefferman, University of ChicagoTalk Title
Have we seen a demonstration of experimental quantum advantage?Abstract
"A major goal for the field of quantum computation is “quantum advantage" -- the first experimental demonstration of a quantum computation that is beyond the capabilities of any classical computer. While we have now seen many quantum advantage claims made by experimental groups around the world, many of these claims have been disproven.In this talk we'll discuss the status quo regarding the latest experimental quantum advantage claims and the evidence for their classical hardness. We’ll then discuss the classical verification problem, and propose a new quantum advantage proposal that uses ideas from quantum error correction to enable a large gap between classical verification and simulation."
Biography
"Bill Fefferman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research explores the power of quantum computers in both the near-term and the indefinite future. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award (2020), a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (2018), and a Google Scholar Award (2022). Before coming to Chicago he held research positions at the University of Maryland/NIST and at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech."Research Area/Interest: Quantum computing, theory
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Zoom: TBA
Panopto: TBATIME Wednesday, April 29, 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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Apr30
EVENT DETAILS
lessJoin us for free bagels and coffee followed by an informal discussion hosted by CSPAC and CSSI.
TIME Thursday, April 30, 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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May4
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
May 4 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Moon DuchinTalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBA---
Zoom: TBA
Panopto: TBATIME Monday, May 4, 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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May6
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / Student Seminar
May 6 / 12:00 PM
Mudd 3514Speaker:
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Bio: TBA
TIME Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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May13
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / Student Seminar
May 13 / 12:00 PM
Mudd 3514Speaker:
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Bio: TBA
TIME Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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May14
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Distinguished Lecture
May 14 / 4:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Prabhakar RaghavanTalk Title:
Can AI assist in Mathematics and Computer Science research?Abstract:
We share our experience using LLMs to obtain new results in mathematics and computer science. We begin with an illustrative example from load-balancing in planet-scale cloud systems, outlining the abilities and limitations of LLMs. Next, we describe our experience with AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary language model from Google DeepMind, to establish new results in the approximability of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), and MAX-CUT problem. We also derive new bounds for several Ramsey numbers. Our methodology entails evolving fleets of Python programs that generate proof chunks to yield these results, and to accelerate proof verification by up to 10,000x. We suggest that our results on inapproximability and Ramsey theory could not have been discovered by hand, and conclude with reflections on the state and promise of AI in mathematics and CS research.Biography:
Prabhakar Raghavan is the Chief Technologist at Google, where he has held several senior roles since joining in 2012, including Senior Vice President with oversight of Search, Maps, Advertising, Gemini and Payments, and before that, responsibility for Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar and Google Docs. Previously, he led Yahoo! Labs and served as CTO at Verity, Inc following over a decade at IBM Research. He co-authored the textbooks Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval. Raghavan received a PhD from Berkeley and a Dottore ad honorem from the University of Bologna, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.---
Zoom: TBAPanopto: TBA
TIME Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 4:00 PM - 5:00 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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May18
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / Student Seminar
May 18 / 12:00 PM
Mudd 3514Speaker: TBA
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Bio: TBA
TIME Monday, May 18, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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May20
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Distinguished Lecture
May 20 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Julio OttinoTalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBA---
Zoom: TBA
Panopto: TBATIME Wednesday, May 20, 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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May27
EVENT DETAILS
lessCome celebrate with us at the annual end of year department awards on Wednesday May 27th. Details to come.
TIME Wednesday, May 27, 2026 at 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
LOCATION TGS Commons, 2122 Sheridan Road map it
CONTACT Wynante Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)