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Seminars, Workshops, & Talks
CS Colloquium Series

View our upcoming and past CS Colloquium Series talks. View all talk recordings here. Please note: Panopto recordings require Northwestern log-in credentials.

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2023-24 Speakers

Sam Westrick

Post Doc, Carnegie Mellon University
"“Parallelism First”: New Foundations for Provably Efficient and Safe Parallel Programming"
March 27, 2024
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John Hewitt

Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University
"Understanding Language Models through Discovery and by Design"
March 4, 2024
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Sarah Cen

Ph.D. Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Paths to AI Accountability"
February 28, 2024
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Abhishek Shetty

Ph.D. Candidate, University of California at Berkeley
"Modeling Uncertainty for Designing Efficient Algorithms for Machine Learning"
February 14, 2024
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Bento Natura

Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Tech
"Recent Advances in Strongly Polynomial Algorithms for Linear Programming"
February 12, 2024
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Sewon Min

Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington
"Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models"
January 31st 2024
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Ermin Wei

Associate Professor, Northwestern University
"Flexible and Faithful Federated Learning and Unlearning Methods"
January 26th 2024
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Sara Fridovich-Keil

Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University
"White-Box Computational Imaging: Measurements to Images to Insights "
January 19th 2024
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Matt Groh

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
"Designing and Evaluating Human-AI Collaboration"
January 17th 2024
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Rajeev Thakur

Argonne Distinguished Fellow and Deputy Director of the Data Science and Learning Division, Argonne National Laboratory
"Challenges and Opportunities for MPI in the Post-Exascale Era"
December 4th 2023
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Sujaya Maiyya

Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo
"Fortifying Cloud Data Privacy: Achieving Fault Tolerance and High Performance in Oblivious Databases"
October 30th 2023
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Nikos Hardavellas

Associate Professor, Northwestern University
"Reshaping Computer Systems for the New Hardware Landscape"
October 25th 2023
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Eleanor O'Rourke

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
"Why Do Students Think They're Bad at Programming? Towards Intelligent Systems to Support Motivation and Learning in CS1"
October 23rd 2023
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Gabriela Marcu

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
"Robots and Opioids: Understanding How Communities Want to Deploy Technologies for their Safety"
Octber 11th 2023
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Jerry Li

Senior Research Scientist, Microsoft Research Redmond
"A Theory for Quantum Learning in the NISQ Era"
September 18th 2023
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Previous Speakers

2022-23 Speakers

Alex Conway

Senior Researcher, VMware Research Group
“Data Structures for Fast Systems”
March 13, 2023
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Gokul Subramanian Ravi

Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago
“A Hybrid Computing Ecosystem For Practical Quantum Advantage”
March 13, 2023
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Yujia Jin

PHD Candidate, Stanford University
“Towards Optimal Optimization of Structured Games”
March 8, 2023
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Tri Dao

PHD Candidate, Stanford University
“Algorithms and Systems for Efficient Machine Learning”
February 27, 2023
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Nick Spooner

Assistant Proffessor, University of Warwick
“How Efficiently Can We Check a Computation?”
February 27, 2023
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Monica Agrawal

PHD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Scalable Natural Language Processing for Transforming Medicine”
February 22, 2023
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Chinmay Nirkhe

Research Staff Scientist, IBM Quantum
“On the Complexity of Quantum Many Body Systems”
February 22, 2023
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Frederic Koehler

Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
“Towards the Statistically Principled Design of ML Algorithms”
February 20, 2023
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Masatoshi Uehara

Ph.D. student, Cornell University
“Statistically Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning”
February 20, 2023
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Dong Li

Associate Professor, University of California Merced
“Democratizing Large-Scale AI Model Training via Heterogeneous Memory”
February 15, 2023
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Mark Sheinin

Post-doctoral Research Associate, Carnegie Mellon University
“Computational Imaging for Enabling Vision Beyond Human Perception”
February 15, 2023
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Nicole Wein

Postdoc, Rutgers Univesity
“Distance-Estimation in Modern Graphs: Algorithms and Impossibility”
February 13, 2023
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Victor Zhong  

PhD Student, University of Washington
“Reading to Learn”
February 13, 2023
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Sunoo Park 

Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University
“Cryptography, Security, & Law”
February 8, 2023
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Ari Holtzman

Graduate Student, University of Washington 
“Controlling Large Large Language Models: Generating (Useful) Text from Models We Don't Fully Understand”
February 8, 2023
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Marcelo Worsley

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
“(Some of) The Many Layers of Designing for Inclusivity”
January 11, 2023
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Esteban Carisimo

Postdoc, Northwestern University
“Characteristics of Internet’s intercontinental connectivity”
November 29, 2022
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Tomasz Kociumaka

Postdoc, Max Planck institute for Informatics, Germany
“Gap Edit Distance via Non-Adaptive Queries: Simple and Optimale”
November 9, 2022
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Sorrachai Yingchareonthawornchai

Ph.D. student, Aalto University 
“Deterministic Small Vertex Connectivity in Almost Linear Time”
November 8, 2022
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Simone Campanoni

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
“Evolving Abstractions Within and Around Compilers to Support Modern Hardware and Application Trends”
November 7, 2022
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Thuy-Duong Vuong 

Ph.D. student, Stanford University 
“Fractionally Log-Concave and Sector-Stable Polynomials: Counting Planar Matchings and More”
November 2, 2022
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Sooyeon Jeong 

Postdoc, Northwestern University 
“Designing and Deploying Robotic Companions for Health and Wellbeing”
October 26, 2022
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Aadirupa Saha

Visiting Faculty, Toyota Technological Instituteat Chicago
“Battling Bandits: Exploiting Preference Feedback towards Efficient Information Aggregation”
October 19, 2022
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Duri Long

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
"Fostering Human-Machine Understanding through Education & Design"
October 5, 2022
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Malcolm MacIver

Professor, Northwestern University
“Biological planning deciphered via AI algorithms and robot-animal competition in partially observable environments”
September 26, 2022
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Meena Jagadeesan

Ph.D. student, UC Berkeley
“Learning Equilibria in Matching Markets from Bandit Feedback"
September 07, 2022
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Meena Jagadeesan

Ph.D. student, UC Berkeley
"Machine Learning in Digital Marketplaces: Interactions between Learners, Consumers, and Producers"
September 06, 2022
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2021-22 Speakers

Amy Ousterhout

Postdoc, UC Berkeley
“Optimizing CPU Efficiency and Tail Latency in Datacenters”
March 04, 2022
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Sam Kriegman

Postdoc, Joint at Harvard & Tufts
“From Biology to Bots and Back: The computational design of robots and life.”
March 02, 2022
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Andrea Coladangelo

Postdoc, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
“Quantum Computation and Cryptography: a changing landscape”
February 28, 2022
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Tyler Allen

Ph.D. Candidate, Clemson University
“Holistic Performance Analysis and Optimization of Unified Memory”
February 25, 2022
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Lin Ma

Postdoc, Carnegie Mellon University
“Putting your database on autopilot: self-driving database management systems”
February 23, 2022
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Katerina Sotiraki

Postdoc, UC Berkeley
“Towards post-quantum cryptography: complexity and protocols”
February 21, 2022
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Tony Geng

Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington
“Flexible Hardware as the Key to Accelerating Optimized Neural Networks”
February 18, 2022
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Alex Wein

Research Fellow, UC Berkeley
"Understanding Statistical-vs-Computational Tradeoffs via Low-Degree Polynomials"
February 16, 2022
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Manolis Zampetakis

Postdoc, UC Berkeley
“How to handle Biased Data and Multiple Agents in Machine Learning?”
February 14, 2022
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Jonathan Baker

Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago
"Architecting Emerging Quantum Technologies"
February 09, 2022
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Yang Song

Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford
"Learning to Generate Data by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution"
February 07, 2022
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Nan Tang

Senior Scientist, Qatar Computing Research Institute
"From Absolute Good Data to Relative Good Data: Data Preparation for Data-centric AI"
January 26, 2022
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Andrea Lincoln

Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley
Average-Case Fine-Grained Complexity
January 24, 2022
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Kuikui Liu

Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington
"Spectral Independence: A New Tool to Analyze Markov Chains"
January 19, 2022
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2020-21 Speakers

Kristin Stephens-Martinez

Assistant Professor, Duke University
"A Scaled Class is a Rich Class: How to approach large class data sets to drive class improvements"
May 26, 2021
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Emma Alexander

Postdoc, UC Berkeley
"Bio-Inspired Visual Sensing: Depth, Color, and Motion"
May 24, 2021
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Martez Mott

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
"Accessible Virtual Reality for People with Limited Mobility"
May 19, 2021
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Emina Torlak

Associate Professor, University of Washington
"Solver-Aided Programming for All"
April 28, 2021
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Rob Voigt

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
"Linguistically-Informed NLP for Social Impact"
April 26, 2021
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Aditi Raghunathan

Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University
"Rethinking the Role of Data in Robust Machine Learning"
April 16, 2021
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Miklos Racz

Assistant Professor, Princeton University
"Algorithmic and Statistical Challenges on Large Discrete Structures"
March 29, 2021
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Swabha Swayamdipta

Postdoctoral Investigator, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
"Modeling Humans for Designing Effective Collaborative AI Systems"
March 15, 2021
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Ishwarya Ananthabhotla

Ph.D. Candidate, MIT
"Cognitive Audio": Enabling Auditory Interfaces with an Understanding of How We Hear"
March 10, 2021
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Lucy Lu Wang

Postdoctoral Investigator, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
"Practical NLP for Biomedicine"
March 8, 2021
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Shiwali Mohan

AI Systems Researcher, Xerox PAC
"Modeling Humans for Designing Effective Collaborative AI Systems"
February 24, 2021
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Bashima Islam

Ph.D. Candidate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Computing on the extreme edge"
February 22, 2021
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Gonzalo Ramos

Hosted by Latin@CS
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research at Redmond
"Interactive Machine Teaching: Concepts and Lessons"
January 27, 2021
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Noshir Contractor

Professor, Northwestern
"People Analytics: Using Digital Exhaust from the Web to Leverage Network Insights in the Workplace"
January 22, 2021
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Chad Jenkins

Professor, Associate Director of the Robotics Institute, University of Michigan
“Semantic Robot Programming...and Maybe Making the World a Better Place"
January 11, 2021

Netta Gurari

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
"New Approaches for Characterizing Perception using Human-Computer Interfaces: Implications for Stroke"
December 2, 2020
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Stevie Chancellor

Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University
Human-Centered Machine Learning for Dangerous Mental Health Behaviors Online
November 23, 2020
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Steve Franconeri

Professor, Northwestern University
"A Neural Network Model of Human Perception + Understanding in Data Visualizations"
November 11, 2020

Jennifer Cutler

Associate Professor, Northwestern University
"Leveraging social media’s structure to improve marketing insight extraction"
November 4, 2020

Konstantin Makarychev

Associate Professor, Northwestern University
"Three Tales on Clustering: From theory to practice"
October 26, 2020
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Jennie Rogers

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
"Privacy-preserving querying for data federations"
October 21, 2020
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Emily Cooper

Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
"Perceptual Science for Augmented Reality"
October 19, 2020
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Matt Easterday

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
"Educational technology for civics"
October 9, 2020
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Aravindan Vijayaraghavan

Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
"How to reason about typical instances of algorithmic problems"
October 5, 2020
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Fred Chong

Professor, Computer Science at the University of Chicago
“Resource-Efficient Quantum Computing by Breaking Abstractions”
January 27, 2020
Hosted by: Prof. Nikos Hardavellas
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Speakers in 2019

Maya Ackerman

Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering at Santa Clara University
“Machines as Creative Partners”
November 18, 2019
Hosted by: Prof. Bryan Pardo
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Kate Compton

Open-source researcher
“Casual Creators: Powering-Up Creativity with AI”
November 11, 2019
Hosted by: Prof. Ian Horswill
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Leana Golubchik

Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at USC
“Deconstructing Distributed Deep Learning”
November 6, 2019
Hosted by: Prof. Samir Khuller
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Kathi Fisler

Professor (Research), Computer Science at Brown University.
“In Defense of Little Code”
October 28, 2019
Hosted by: Prof. Robby Findler
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Ágnes Horvát

Assistant Professor, Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
“The Science of Sharing and the Sharing of Science: Diffusion of Scientific Articles across Online Platforms”
October 23, 2019
Hosted by: Prof. Robby Findler
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Andrew McPherson

Associate Professo, Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London
“Digital Musical Instrument Design: a Player-Centered Approach” 
October 9, 2019
Hosted by: Prof. Bryan Pardo
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Ying Wu

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University
“Making Intelligent Seeing Machines”
October 7, 2019
Hosted by: Prof. Randy Berry
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Speakers in 2018

Prof. Nick Diakopoulos

Assistant Professor, Computational Journalism Lab (CJL) at Northwestern University
“Journalistic Media Mining”
Hosted by: Prof. Larry Birnbaum

Prof. Constantinos Daskalakis

Professor, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT
“Improving Generative Adversarial Networks using Game Theory and Statistics”
Hosted by: EECS Department

Prof. Denis Nekipelov

Associate Professor, Department of Economics at University of Virginia
“Empirical Studies of Markets with Learning Agents”
Hosted by: EECS Department

Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIIT Delhi
“Privacy & Security in Online Social Media”
Hosted by: Prof. Yan Chen

Prof. Joyce Chai

Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University
“Language Communication with Robots”
Hosted by: Prof. Kenneth D. Forbus

Dr. Maxim Sviridenko

Senior Director, Scalable Algorithms and Machine Learning at Yahoo Research
“Matching Auctions for Search and Native Ads”
Hosted by: Prof. Konstantin Makarychev

Kent Quanrud

PhD Student, Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“Submodular Function Maximization in Parallel via the Multilinear Relaxation”
Hosted by: Prof. Konstantin Makarychev

Prof. Michael Hicks

Professor, Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland
“Updatable Software since 2001: A Research Odyssey”
Hosted by: Prof. Christos Dimoulas

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Speakers in 2017

Prof. Mike Eisenberg

Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder
"Designing for Irrational Curiosity"
Hosted by: CS Division & CSLS Graduate Program

Dr. Huck Bennett

Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University
"On the Quantitative Hardness of the Closest Vector Problem"
Hosted by: CS Division

Prof. Andy Ko

Associate Professor, University of Washington
"Learning to Code: Why We Fail, How We Flourish"
Hosted by: Prof. Haoqi Zhang

Prof. Dan Roth

Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor, University of Pennsylvania
"Natural Language Understanding with Incidental Supervision"
Hosted by: Prof. Doug Downey

Dr. Shuo Chen

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
"Reflections about Security Research in an Industrial Lab"
Hosted by: CS Division

Dana Berman

PhD Candidate, Tel Aviv University
"Haze Lines for Single Image Dehazing & Color Restoration"
Hosted by: Prof. Oliver S. Cossairt

Dr. Ioan Raicu

Associate Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology
"Big Data System Infrastructure at Extreme Scales"
Hosted by: CS & CE Dept.

Prof. Matthias Scheutz

Professor, Tufts University
"Towards an Integrated Architecture for Open-World Human-Robot Interactions"
Hosted by: Prof. Kenneth D Forbus

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Speakers in 2016

Prof. Nick Montfort

Professor of Digital Media, MIT
"Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities"
Hosted by: Prof. Ian Horswill

Prof. Lenhart Schubert

Professor, CS Dept. at University of Rochester
"From Semantic Parsing to Knowledge-Based Reasoning"
Hosted by: Prof. Ken Forbus

Leilani Battle

PhD Student, CSAIL Database Research Group at MIT
"Behavior-Driven Optimization Techniques for Scalable Data Exploration"
Hosted by: Prof. Jennie Rogers

Prof. Arvind Krishnamurthy

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington
"A Software Defined Data Plane for Datacenters"
Hosted by: Prof. Fabian Bustamante

Dr. Peter Clark

Senior Research Manager at the Allen Institute for AI
"Project Aristo: Towards a System that Can Answer Elementary Science Questions"
Hosted by: Prof. Ken Forbus

Prof. Matthias Felleisen

Trustee Professor, College of CIS at Northeastern University
"Types for Untyped Languages"
Hosted by: Prof. Robby Findler

Prof. Karen Livescu

Assistant Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago at the University of Chicago
"Toward Neural Segmental Sequence Models"
Hosted by: Prof. Doug Downey

Johan de Kleer

Director, Systems & Practices Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
"A New Paradigm for Design"
Hosted by: Prof. Ken Forbus

Prof. Jack Lutz

Professor of Computer Science, Iowa State University
"50 Shades of Symbolic Representation and Reasoning"
Hosted by: Prof. Ming-Yang Kao

Prof. Daniel Jackson

Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"What are the Elements of Software Design?"
Hosted by: Prof. Robby Findler

Dr. Pablo Sprechmann

Postdoctoral Researcher, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University
"Solving Inverse Problems in Image & Audio Processing: From Sparse Models to Deep Learning"
Hosted by: Prof. Bryan Pardo

Prof. Arjun Guha

Assistant Professor of CS, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
"Reclaiming Security for Web Programmers"
Hosted by: Prof. Robby Findler

Dr. Manuel Serrano

Senior Scientist at INRIA
"Programming the Diffuse Web with Hop.js & HipHop.js"
Hosted by: Prof. Robby Findler

Prof. Siddhartha Jonnalagadda

Assistant Professor in Preventive Medicine-Health & Biomedical Informatics at Northwestern
"Natural Language Processing Applications in Biomedicine"
Hosted by: Prof. Robby Findler

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