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  • Jan
    24

    CS Seminar: Steering Machine Learning Ecosystems of Interacting Agents (Meena Jagadeesan)

    Department of Computer Science (CS)

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

    EVENT DETAILS

    Friday / CS Seminar
    January 24th / 12:00 PM
    Hybrid / Mudd 3514

    Speaker
    Meena Jagadeesan, UC Berkeley

    Talk Title
    Steering Machine Learning Ecosystems of Interacting Agents

    Abstract

    "Modern machine learning models—such as LLMs and recommender systems—interact with humans, companies, and other models in a broader ecosystem. However, these multi-agent interactions often induce unintended ecosystem-level outcomes such as clickbait in classical content recommendation ecosystems, and more recently, safety violations and market concentration in nascent LLM ecosystems.

    In this talk, I discuss my research on characterizing and steering ecosystem-level outcomes. I take an economic and statistical perspective on ML ecosystems, tracing outcomes back to the incentives of interacting agents and to the ML pipeline for training models. First, in LLM ecosystems, we show how analyzing a single model in isolation fails to capture ecosystem-level performance trends: for example, training a model with more resources can counterintuitively hurt ecosystem-level performance. To help steer ecosystem-level outcomes, we develop technical tools to assess how proposed policy interventions affect market entry, safety compliance, and user welfare. Then, turning to content recommendation ecosystems, we characterize a feedback loop between the recommender system and content creators, which shapes the diversity and quality of the content supply. Finally, I present a broader vision of ML ecosystems where multi-agent interactions are steered towards the desired algorithmic, market, and societal outcomes."

    Biography
    Meena Jagadeesan is a 5th year PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where she is advised by Michael I. Jordan and Jacob Steinhardt. Her research investigates multi-agent interactions in machine learning ecosystems from an economic and statistical perspective. She has received an Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship.

    Research/Interest Areas
    Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Economics and Computation
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    Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92665903240?pwd=YGOjSzB0Pxk4oDvRsVBbA0auFIvH0p.1
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    TIME Friday, January 24, 2025 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)

  • Jul
    31

    Designing interactive systems for reasoning with ontological uncertainty in data analysis

    Department of Computer Science (CS)

    2:00 PM ITW, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center

    EVENT DETAILS

    TIME Thursday, July 31, 2025 at 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

    LOCATION ITW, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center    map it

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

    CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

  • Aug
    4

    Clustering without knowing the number of clusters.

    Department of Computer Science (CS)

    1:30 PM 3501, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library)

    EVENT DETAILS

    TIME Monday, August 4, 2025 at 1:30 PM - 4:00 PM

    LOCATION 3501, 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)

  • Sep
    25

    Bagel Thursday

    Department of Computer Science (CS)

    9:00 AM

    EVENT DETAILS

    TIME Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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

    CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)