News & EventsDepartment Events & Announcements
Events
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Mar14
EVENT DETAILS
Friday / CS Seminar
March 14th / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Clayton Thomas, Microsoft ResearchTalk Title
Explaining Matching Mechanisms to ParticipantsAbstract
"Matching is ubiquitous: throughout our lives, we are matched to degree programs, jobs, romantic partners, and Uber drivers. An important matching problem lies in assigning students to schools, where many cities now use matching mechanisms that allocate seats based on students' reported preferences. These mechanisms are carefully designed to be *strategyproof,* meaning students cannot benefit by misreporting their preferences. Unfortunately, this theoretical property is often misunderstood and hard to see transparently in practice, leading to confusion and real harm for participants. Hence, designing not just the mechanism, but its *explanation,* becomes a first-order concern.My work introduces a fundamentally new way to describe classic matching mechanisms that frames them as a process of a student "picking from a menu." These new descriptions expose strategyproofness directly, by making it hold via a simple, one-line argument. I will present such a new, strategyproofness-exposing description of the celebrated real-world Deferred Acceptance mechanism, where traditional proofs of strategyproofness are mathematically intricate and inaccessible to most participants. Additionally, I will discuss our lab experiment testing how real participants understand and interact with our new description and its strategyproofness. Finally, I will connect these themes to some of my broader research in transparency and interpretability in economic design, informed by a toolkit inherently tailored to reasoning about fundamental design problems, namely, theoretical computer science."
Biography
Clayton Thomas is a postdoctoral researcher in the EconCs group at Microsoft Research, New England. His work focuses on theoretical computer science and economic design: striving to build systems that perform well under strategic incentives. He has worked on a range of topics, including stable matchings, strategic simplicity, behavioral economics, communication complexity, transaction fee mechanisms, information design, and combinatorial auctions. He completed his PhD in the computer science theory group at Princeton University, where he was awarded the Wallace Memorial Fellowship in Engineering from Princeton and a Siebel Scholar award.Research/Interest Areas
Theory, EconCs, Explainability---
Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97479152148?pwd=Ty0xPwiVnYyOqvLpWaUWHZn6ApjIXx.1
Panopto: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=8b49b025-6612-4207-b999-b29f00f45757TIME Friday, March 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3512, 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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Mar17
EVENT DETAILS
Winter exams begin
TIME Monday, March 17, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Mar17
EVENT DETAILS
Monday / CS Seminar
March 17th / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Ruohan Zhang, Stanford VisionTalk Title
Toward Human-Centered Embodied AIAbstract
My research focuses on developing human-centered, human-inspired, and human-compatible embodied AI, structured around three pillars: human tasks, human data, and human interfaces. To systematically study intelligent behaviors (both human and artificial) in natural tasks and environments, we develop BEHAVIOR, a comprehensive simulation toolkit that supports 1,000 essential everyday tasks identified through large-scale survey studies. BEHAVIOR instantiates these tasks in interactive and ecologically valid virtual environments utilizing the state-of-the-art physics simulator. My approach to achieving human-level performance in these tasks requires embodied AI systems to learn from multimodal human data, such as body motion, eye movements, language, and reward signals. To enable such learning, we design novel interfaces that capture diverse human behavior data at scale, alongside algorithms that allow embodied agents to learn from such data effectively. To augment human capabilities and overcome their physical limitations (e.g., for patients with motor disabilities), we develop intelligent brain-robot interfaces, leveraging intracortical arrays and electroencephalogram (EEG), that can assist individuals in performing everyday tasks. For future work, we hope the infrastructure we have built can serve as powerful open-source tools that inspire and support a new generation of human-centered AI research, with the goals of understanding human brains and behaviors in natural tasks and environments, developing human-inspired and human-compatible AI solutions, and augmenting human capabilities with embodied AI.Biography
Ruohan Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, advised by Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. His research focuses on embodied AI, human-robot interaction, brain-computer interfaces, and cognitive science. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Dana Ballard and Mary Hayhoe. He has received several paper awards or nominations from robotics conferences and workshops. He has served as a program committee member, reviewer, or editor for conferences and journals in machine learning, robotics, and cognitive science, including NeurIPS, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, CogSci, Frontiers, and the Journal of Vision.Research/Interest Areas
robotics; human-robot interaction; cognitive science; neuroscience---
Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97629411184?pwd=t01DJrwaREICRbCoHbi3bhvlMVFvz4.1
Panopto: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e1faba26-2fd5-45ee-b016-b29e01655df1TIME Monday, March 17, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3512, 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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Mar22
EVENT DETAILS
Spring Break Begins
TIME Saturday, March 22, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Mar31
EVENT DETAILS
Spring Break Ends
TIME Monday, March 31, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Apr3
EVENT DETAILS
Join us for a poster session highlighting the incredible work of students in the Computer Science Research Track Program over the fall and winter quarters!
Learn more about the Research Track Program here: Research Track Program
TIME Thursday, April 3, 2025 at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Bella Barrios marbella.barrios@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Jun15
EVENT DETAILSmore info
2024-2025 Commencement Ceremony
TIME Sunday, June 15, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Jun16
EVENT DETAILS
McCormick School of Engineering PhD Hooding and Master's Degree Recognition Ceremony. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.
TIME Monday, June 16, 2025 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 2705 Ashland Ave
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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Jun16
EVENT DETAILSmore info
McCormick School of Engineering Undergraduate Convocation. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.
TIME Monday, June 16, 2025 at 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
LOCATION 2705 Ashland Ave
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science