Adobe Research Visits Northwestern

Northwestern Engineering welcomed three leaders from Adobe Research to Northwestern University’s Evanston campus on June 10 and 11 to discuss potential research collaborations and engagement with faculty and students from the McCormick School of Engineering as well as Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, School of Communication, and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Samir Khuller, Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science at Northwestern Engineering, welcomed senior principal scientist and org head within Adobe Research Vishy Swaminathan, senior director of the Document Intelligence Lab Tong Sun, and principal scientist Eunyee Koh.

"We are delighted to continue to engage with Adobe Research, and this partnership has led to great benefits for research groups with aligned interests,” Khuller said. “We are grateful for their support."

Khuller reflected on the multi-year partnership between Adobe and Northwestern Computer Science, which has included a campus visit in 2019, the 2020 Digital Marketing and Computer Science Workshop, a joint research workshop in 2021, and a reception and tour of Adobe Research’s San Jose office that Sun organized during a Bay Area spring break trip for 23 undergraduates in April 2024. Adobe Research has also partnered with the MBAi program, an AI-focus MBA offered jointly by the Kellogg School of Management and Northwestern Engineering. In 2021, a team of MBAi students collaborated with Adobe Research on two capstone projects.

In addition, on June 9, Koh joined the industry panel at the annual meeting of the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Khuller also highlighted several Northwestern Computer Science graduates and former postdocs who currently hold positions at Adobe, such as research scientist Victor Bursztyn (PhD ’22), who specialized in natural language processing at Northwestern Engineering and was advised by Professor Larry Birnbaum. Prem Seetharaman (PhD ’19), who has worked with Adobe Research since December 2023 as a senior research scientist, studied computer audition, machine learning, and human computer interaction with Professor Bryan Pardo.

Student research internships, Khuller emphasized, have led to many research collaborations spanning key focus areas of the department, including AI, algorithms and theory, human-computer interaction, information visualization, and machine learning.

Swaminathan estimated that 80 to 90 percent of intern projects are published in top-tier publications, and that at least half of the projects are extended into research projects continued by researchers. PhD candidate Sergio Servantez, for instance, spent more than two years with the Document Intelligence Lab conducting research in legal natural language processing. He was the first author of a 2024 paper coauthored with his adviser Professor Kris Hammond. They collaborated with Adobe Research’s Joe Barrow and Rajiv Jain on “Chain of Logic: Rule-Based Reasoning with Large Language Models,” which explores causal language models as rule-based reasoners, specifically with respect to compositional rules that consist of multiple elements which form a complex logical expression.

“Adobe Research is the intersection of what you can do at academia, industry, and design. We are focused on cutting-edge research with our eye on real-world impact,” Swaminathan said. “I always say that our best kept secret is that we learn so much from our interns. Their projects actually blossom and many of those end up in our products later.”

Seetharaman and PhD candidate Hugo Flores García, who was a summer 2024 research intern at Adobe Research in San Francisco, collaborated with Pardo and Adobe Research’s Oriol Nieto and Justin Salamon on the Sketch2Sound project that helped develop two features in Adobe Firefly, the text-to-image foundational model.

Professor Jason Hartline and PhD student Matthew vonAllmen, who is a research intern at Adobe Research in San Jose this summer, previously collaborated with Adobe Research’s Atanu Sinha on the project “Fundamental Limits of Throughput and Availability: Applications to Prophet Inequalities & Transaction Fee Mechanism Design.” The paper was published in the 2024 Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.

In another collaboration with Adobe Research, Khuller and Joshua Hoeflich (’19, MS ’21) aimed to reinvent user interactions with PDF. The team’s paper discussing the design of interactive PDF consumption prototypes, “ATLAS: A System for PDF-centric Human Interaction Data Collection,” was published in the Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies.

During the visit, the Adobe Research representatives met with Northwestern faculty members, postdocs, and students to discuss potential research intersections. In addition, they toured Karan Ahuja’s Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing & Experiences (SPICE) Lab and Nivedita Arora’s VAK Sustainable Computing Lab. Swaminathan, Sun, and Koh also had lunch with Northwestern Engineering Dean Christopher Schuh and Francesca Cornelli, dean of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Northwestern presenters also included:

• Nivedita Arora, Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Junior Professor of Design and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science
• Larry Birnbaum, professor of computer science
• Andrew Crotty, assistant professor of computer science
• Elizabeth Gerber, professor of mechanical engineering and (by courtesy) computer science and professor of communication studies at Northwestern’s School of Communication
• Kris Hammond, Bill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science, director of the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence Program
• Jason Hartline, professor of computer science
• Jessica Hullman, Ginni Rometty Professor of Computer Science
• Manling Li, assistant professor of computer science
• Han Liu, Orrington Lunt Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences and professor of statistics at Weinberg
• Duri Long, assistant professor of communication studies and (by courtesy) computer science
• Eric J. Perreault, vice president for research
• Denis Peskoff, postdoctoral fellow of linguistics
• David Sack, associate dean of alumni relations and development at Kellogg
• Matt Simpson, managing director of marketing at Kellogg
• V.S. Subrahmanian, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and faculty fellow at the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs