News & Events / Seminars, Workshops, & TalksDistinguished Lecture Series
View our upcoming and past CS Distinguished Lecture Series talks. View all talk recordings here. Please note: Panopto recordings require Northwestern log-in credentials.Jump to a Section
2023-24 Speakers
Brenda Darden Wilkerson
President and CEO of AnitaB.org,
"The Power of One: Who is Missing In Tech?"
May 22, 2024
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Monica Lam
Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor, Stanford University
"Trustworthy Conversational Chatbots for Your Data with Generative AI"
May 8, 2024
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Tong Zhang
Professor, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
"Machine Learning Methods for Finetuning and Alignment of Large Language Models"
May 1, 2024
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Magdalena Balazinska
Professor, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair, and Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
"Video Data Management with VOCAL"
November 6, 2023
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Abhishek Bhattacharjee
Professor, Yale University
"Computer Architectures for Neural Interfaces"
November 2, 2023
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Suchi Saria
Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University,
"AI for augmenting clinical teams: opportunity, technical hurdles, promising results, and open problems"
October 4, 2023
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Armando Fox
Professor, UC Berkeley
"Scalable Mastery Learning for CS100 and Beyond"
September 25, 2023
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2022-23 Speakers
Dinesh Manocha
Professor, University of Maryland College Park
"Robot Navigation in Complex Indoor and Outdoor Environments"
January 24, 2023
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Ming Ling
Chair of Computer Science, University of Maryland College Park
"Reconstructing Reality: From Physical World to Virtual Environments"
January 23, 2023
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Ben Shneiderman
Professor, University of Maryland
"Human-Centered AI: Ensuring Human Control While Increasing the Level of Automation"
January 20, 2023
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Previous Series
2021-22 Speakers
Claire Mathieu
Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifiqie
"Two-sided matching markets with correlated random preferences"
November 29, 2021
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Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
"How attention research guides the design of effective spatial auditory displays"
November 17, 2021
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Benjamin C. Pierce
Professor, University of Pennsylvania
"The Science of Deep Specification, Past and Future"
November 08, 2021
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Umesh Vazirani
Professor, UC Berkeley
"A Quantum Wave in Computing"
November 03, 2021
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Saman Amarasinghe
Professor, MIT
"Making Sparse Array Programming On Par With Dense"
October 27, 2021
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Kathy Yelick
Professor, UC Berkeley
"Machine Learning in Science: Applications, Algorithms and Architectures"
October 22, 2021
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Tom Goldstein
Associate Professor, University of Maryland
"Solving Complex Reasoning Problems with Thinking Systems"
October 13, 2021
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Heng Ji
Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Information Surgery"
September 27, 2021
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2020-21 Speakers
Rosalind Picard
Professor, MIT and Empatica
"Is AI going to hurt or help mental health?"
April 21, 2021
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Jenna Wiens
Associate Professor, University of Michigan
"From Diagnosis to Treatment - Augmenting Clinical Decision Making with Artificial Intelligence"
April 19, 2021
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V.S. Subrahmanian
Professor, Dartmouth College
"VEST: An Early Warning System for Future Cyber-Attacks"
February 15, 2021
Jelani Nelson
Professor, UC Berkeley
"Sketching Algorithms"
January 20, 2021
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Adam Klivans
Professor, The University of Texas at Austin
"Computational/Statistical Gaps for Learning Neural Networks"
November 09, 2020
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Moshe Vardi
Professor, Rice University
"Lessons from COVID-19: Efficiency vs Resilience"
September 23, 2020
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2019-2020 Speakers
During the 2019-20 Distinguished Lecture Series season, we explored the intersection of computer science and law, computer science theory, and high-performance computer systems.
Valerie Taylor
Director of Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory
"Exploring the Tradeoffs Between Performance and Power for Parallel, Scientific Applications"
October 12, 2020
Research interests: Performance analysis and modeling of parallel, scientific applications.
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Jim Kurose
Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
"How abstractions define a research agenda: from circuits to packets to flows to content to systems in networks, and broader thoughts for computing."
September 28, 2020
Research interests: Computer networks protocol
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Jon Kleinberg – Northwestern Engineering Dean’s Seminar Series
Tisch University Professor, Cornell University
May 13, 2020
Research interests: Networks and information, with an emphasis on social and information networks.
Christos Papadimitriou
The Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University
"Language, Brain, and Computation"
May 6, 2020
Research interests: Computational complexity theory
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Divesh Srivastava
Head of Database Research, AT&T Labs-Research
Towards High-Quality Big Data for Responsible Data Science
January 13, 2020
Research interests: Data quality, data stream management systems, and XML databases.
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Jens Palsberg
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
"Toward a Universal Quantum Programming Language"
December 9, 2019
Research interests: Compilers, embedded systems, programming languages, software engineering, and information security.
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Victoria Stodden
Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"The Lifecycle of Data Science: A Framework for Advancing Computational and Data-enabled Research"
November 20, 2019
Research interests: Reproducibility in computer science, including the study of adequacy and robustness in replicated results.
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Paul Debevec
Research Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California
"Creating Photoreal Digital Actors (and Environments) for Movies, Games, and Virtual Reality"
September 27, 2019
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