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Oct21
EVENT DETAILSmore info
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The SkAI Colloquia series features presentations from leading scholars and researchers working at the intersection of Astro and AI.
This SkAI Colloquium is co-sponsored by NU CS Department and NNCI as part of NNCI’s Distinguished Speakers series.Speaker: Anima Anandkumar
Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences,
Division of Engineering and Applied Science, CaltechTalk title: Neural Operators: AI that understands the Physical World is essential for Scientific Discovery
Abstract:
Scientific progress is limited not by a lack of new ideas but by the time and cost involved in physical experimentation. Scientific discovery is a needle in the haystack problem: it does not help if AI gives you a vastly bigger haystack. Without knowing if any of the ideas work, an AI system that designs experiments just increases the effort required, since performing the experiments to validate the ideas is the real bottleneck.
AI’s most transformative impact in enabling scientific discoveries lies in reducing the need for such experiments. To get there, we need to build AI models that are able to granularly simulate and understand physics at all scales, rather than just abstractly reason in the textual domain.
I will show how methods like Neural Operators are leading the way, and have been successfully applied in weather and climate modeling, plasma evolution in nuclear fusion, designing novel medical devices and accelerating quantum chemistry.
TIME Wednesday, October 21, 2026 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION Auditorium
CONTACT Gema Tinoco Gema.Tinoco@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR SkAI Institute
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Oct22
EVENT DETAILS
lesstba
TIME Thursday, October 22, 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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Oct28
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
October 28 / 11:00 AM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Aaron Shaw, Northwestern UniversityTalk Title
Beyond heuristics: A meta-scientific agenda for generative AI-powered social researchAbstract
Applications of LLMs and generative AI for the simulation of social and behavioral evidence are expanding rapidly. During these early days, norms and standards of evidence remain incoherent and grounded in heuristics inherited from earlier paradigms. This talk argues for a meta-scientific agenda to ground the use of LLMs for social research. Such an agenda should advance around three core principles: (1) validation; (2) transparency; and (3) observation. I illustrate each of these with examples from recent and ongoing work.Biography
Aaron Shaw is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) at
Northwestern University; Co-Founder of the Community Data Science Collective; faculty affiliate of the Northwestern Center for HCI+Design, the Institute for Policy Research, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs; as well as a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He studies organizing, participation, and governance in online communities, especially ones that create public information resources and digital infrastructure. His most recent work includes projects on online community governance, LLM-based social science, AI impacts on digital public infrastructure, and a new book, Peer Production, published by MIT Press.Research Area/Interest: human-computer interaction, social science, social computing, human-centered AI
TIME Wednesday, October 28, 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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Nov2
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
October 28 / 11:00 AM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Farzaneh Derakhshan, Northwestern UniversityTalk Title
Quantitative Security Guarantees for Concurrent SystemsAbstract
Modern software is built from components that interact with each other: processes exchanging messages, threads sharing GPU memory, and AI agents coordinating with one another. Classical security guarantees for such systems are all-or-nothing: a program either leaks secret information or it does not. In practice, however, almost every system leaks some information, so the real question is how much.
In this talk, I will present a type-based (and logic-based) compositional approach to measuring information leakage in concurrent programs. The centerpiece is our recent work on session types, a type discipline that describes communication protocols of message-passing processes. I will show how well-typed probabilistic programs give rise to probability distributions over communication traces, and explain how these distributions let us measure how much an active attacker can gain by interacting with a system: observing the public communications and adapting her strategy based on the messages she receives from the program. I will then briefly discuss how similar ideas, via relational reasoning, can be adapted to GPU programs, where our relational Hoare logic bounds the difference in resource usage between executions with different secrets, quantifying resource usage as a side channel in CUDA kernels. I will close with future directions on extending these guarantees to systems that mix verified and tested components, including black boxes such as third-party services, whose internals we cannot verify but whose interactions we can observe.
Biography
Farzaneh Derakhshan is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northwestern University. Her research is in programming languages, formal methods, and language-based security, with a focus on quantitative and compositional reasoning about concurrent systems. Before joining Northwestern, she was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also received her PhD in Pure and Applied Logic, advised by Frank Pfenning. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at venues including POPL, LICS, OOPSLA, CSF, and ESOP, and is supported by the National Science Foundation.Research Area/Interest: programming languages, formal methods, language-based security
TIME Monday, November 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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Nov2
EVENT DETAILS
lessHigh-stakes applications, such as medicine and defense, increasingly rely on processing sensitive data held by multiple organizations. However, those organizations are often unwilling or unable to share their data due to privacy concerns and regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR. For example, during COVID-19, the NIH needed statistics from hospitals to support public health analytics, but sharing patient records could expose personal information. Secure collaborative analytics (SCA) enables multiple mutually distrustful data providers to jointly answer SQL queries over the union of their private records without revealing them to anyone. Cryptographic techniques, such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and secure multi-party computation (MPC), protect data privacy and verify the integrity of query answers in SCA, but applying them to query evaluation efficiently and at scale is not trivial.
My doctoral research builds database management systems with efficient, scalable, and trustworthy query evaluation for SCA. As my first project, ZKSQL lets a single data provider prove to a client with ZKPs that its query answers are correct and complete with respect to its committed private records. It verifies sorts and joins efficiently with multisets. Next, RESCU-SQL lets mutually distrustful computing parties work together to evaluate queries under MPC, ensuring malicious security against a dishonest majority, aided by a lightweight trusted coordinator to make the execution more efficient. To scale SCA to more data and providers, CASTLE marries these two approaches into a single workflow. First, each provider concurrently evaluates operations over its private records locally and proves the intermediate results to others with ZKPs. CASTLE then runs an authenticated bridge protocol to convert these results into certified inputs for joint evaluation under MPC. It realizes the local and joint phases with ZKSQL and RESCU-SQL. This framework guarantees end-to-end integrity from the committed source records to the final query answer.TIME Monday, November 2, 2026 at 1:00 PM - 3:00 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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Nov4
EVENT DETAILS
lessWednesday / CS Seminar
November 4 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Haoqi Zhang, Northwestern UniversityTalk Title
Computational Ecosystems: Advancing Human Values Through Integrative Computing and Changing PracticeAbstract
Despite decades of computing advances, some human problems and core human values have remained difficult to solve or promote at scale. Instead of advancing individual technologies, I focus our attention on making major leaps in system-level thinking and orchestration. Specifically, I describe my efforts to design, build, and study computational ecosystems that interweave effective practices, interactional structures, and intelligent systems to form new, integrative solutions. Computational ecosystems emphasize (1) combining wedges of human and machine intelligence to make effective practices feasible; and (2) creating processes, interactions, and communities that sustain and deepen practice.
In the first half of my talk, I will share examples of computational ecosystems we built over the last decade that transform how we plan, coordinate, learn, connect, and innovate. The second half of my talk will share our more recent efforts to support human practices and human experiences computationally. I will close with a few thoughts on why we need computational ecosystems, especially if we intend to not only meet our consequentialist aims but to deepen our engagement in intrinsically valuable human activities.
Biography
Haoqi Zhang is an associate professor in Computer Science and Design at Northwestern University, where he also holds a courtesy appointment in Learning Sciences. His work advances the design of integrated socio-technical models that solve complex problems and advance human values. His research work bridges across Computer Science, Design, Learning Science, Psychology, and Philosophy, and is generously supported by the National Science Foundation.
Haoqi received his PhD in Computer Science and BA in Computer Science and Economics from Harvard University. At Northwestern he founded and directs the Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) program, which provides an original model for learning and growing through research for over 180 students (read the DTR annual letters, available at dtr.northwestern.edu/letters; and watch the DTR documentary, Forward, at http://forward.movie). With Matt Easterday, Liz Gerber, and Nell O’Rourke, Haoqi co-directs the Delta Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab and design studio across computer science, learning sciences, and design.
TIME Wednesday, November 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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Nov9
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
November 9 / 11:00 AM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Mohit BansalTalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBATIME Monday, November 9, 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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Nov19
EVENT DETAILS
lesstba
TIME Thursday, November 19, 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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Dec4
EVENT DETAILS
lessTBA
TIME Friday, December 4, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Dec12
EVENT DETAILSmore info
lessThe ceremony will take place on Saturday, December 12 in Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, 50 Arts Circle Drive.
TIME Saturday, December 12, 2026 at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
LOCATION Pick-Staiger Concert Hall map it
CONTACT Andi Joppie andi.joppie@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science