Upcoming CS Seminars

Missed a seminar? No worries! View past seminars via the Northwestern CS Website (northwestern login required).

"High-precision NLP at discount prices: Lessons learned in Semantic Scholar"

Abstract

Natural language processing (NLP) has made major strides in recent years, due to the increasing capabilities of large language models.  However, using NLP to power real applications is still challenging: the best models are expensive to use at scale and are still prone to errors.  I'll describe recent lessons we've learned on the Semantic Scholar team as we've built and deployed applications using NLP aimed at accelerating science, including PDF content extraction, an AI-powered reading interface, and automatically-constructed topics pages for science. While recent NLP breakthroughs do enable exciting new experiences, more long-standing considerations from applied machine learning---like task selection and model design---remain critical.

Biography

Doug Downey is professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, and Senior Director of Semantic Scholar Research at the Allen Institute for AI (where he currently serves full-time).  The Semantic Scholar Research group performs NLP and HCI research aimed at helping scholars discover, understand, and synthesize scientific literature.

Zoom Link:  https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/93420493721?pwd=YzgxcFVaQUxiTDcySUd2WEtGTG94Zz09

Panopto:  https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=ca48eade-a897-47c4-8d47-b0bc0145a676

Research Interests/Area

Natural language processing, human-computer interaction

"Group fairness in multiwinner voting"

Abstract

We consider settings where agents need to collectively select a subset of available alternatives subject to a cardinality/cost constraint: this includes, e.g., choosing representative bodies, appointing validators in a proof-of-stake blockchain, or participatory budgeting in the context of urban planning. We formulate several group fairness axioms for this setting, and investigate whether these axioms can be satisfied by polynomial-time computable voting rules.

Biography

Edith Elkind is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and the Theme lead on Game Theory at the Alan Turing Institute. She obtained her PhD from Princeton in 2005, and has worked in the UK, Israel, and Singapore before joining Oxford in 2013. Her research area is game-theoretic foundations of multiagent systems, with a focus on algorithms for collective decision making and coalition formation. Edith is an ELLIS Fellow, a EurAI Fellow, and a recipient of SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award (2023). She has served as a program chair of COMSOC, WINE, AAMAS, ACM EC, and IJCAI, and is a member of AAAI executive council, SCW council, and IJCAI board of trustees.

Zoom Link:  https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/99313962790?pwd=bHMvbXk4bEJRY3Q4dCtxMENFcURmQT09

Panopto: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e0e7df10-fc49-489b-b28f-b0bd01326d25

Research Interests/Area
Computational social choice, game-theoretic foundations of AI

"Challenges and Opportunities for MPI in the Post-Exascale Era"

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, MPI (Message Passing Interface) has enabled applications to run on many generations of parallel clusters and supercomputing systems, thereby enabling computation-driven progress in essentially all areas of science and engineering. As we enter the era of exascale systems, MPI continues to be the standard interface that most applications use for internode communication and scaling to the full system. This talk will discuss some of the challenges that were overcome for MPI to reach exascale and explore the challenges that must be overcome for MPI to continue to meet the needs of future post-exascale systems and applications.

Biography

Rajeev Thakur is an Argonne Distinguished Fellow and Deputy Director of the Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University. His research interests are in high-performance computing, parallel programming models, runtime systems, communication libraries, scalable parallel I/O, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. He was the director of Software Technology for the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) from 2016 to 2017 and continues as the lead for the Programming Models and Runtimes area in ECP Software Technology. He is a member of the MPI Forum that defines the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. He is also co-author of the MPICH implementation of MPI and the ROMIO implementation of MPI-IO, which have thousands of users all over the world and form the basis of commercial MPI implementations from Intel, HPE/Cray, IBM, Microsoft, and other vendors. MPICH received an R&D 100 Award in 2005. Rajeev is a co-author of the book “Using Advanced MPI: Modern Features of the Message-Passing Interface” published by MIT Press. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2003-2007) and was Technical Program Chair of the SC12 conference. He also served on the Steering Committee of the SC conference series (2015-2018). He is a Fellow of IEEE.

Zoom Link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98742944672?pwd=eUNmd3dabGlyYkxUQThZNjVVRS84QT09

Panopto: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=0c762f3e-4358-4c48-ae8c-b0b6012faf7a 

Research Interests/Area
High-performance computing, parallel programming models, runtime systems, communication libraries, scalable parallel I/O, AI/ML

CS Department Events

CSPAC Tuesday Student Seminars

CSPAC is launching a student seminar series within the CS department. It will run on Tuesdays (12-1pm in 3514 with lunch, like the other seminars).  

The goal is to showcase student research in the department, and to give students an opportunity to give broad audience talks. You can find an overview of the format and goals here.

If you are a PhD student and you are interested in presenting, please reach out to (Vaidehi Srinivas, vaidehi@u.northwestern.edu) directly, and we can schedule a week that works for you.  A tentative schedule can be found here.

While the presenters will be PhD students, everyone in the CS department community (faculty, postdocs, students of all levels, etc.) are invited to attend!

What is CSPAC?

We are the CS PhD Advisory Council.  We are a PhD student-led organization, and our mandate is to interface between PhD students and faculty on academic issues.  Some examples of what we do include: identifying issues in the PhD program and providing input to faculty, and organizing events like the CS Open House and this student seminar series.  (Not to be confused with CSSI– the CS Social Initiative, another student-led organization that organizes social events for the department.)

We want to advocate for PhD students in the department, so if there is some way we can support you, please come talk to us.  We welcome PhD students to our weekly meetings on Tuesdays, 5-5:30pm, Mudd 3501 and/or zoom.  We also welcome anonymous concerns/feedback at any time via this form.  Anyone in the community can reach us at cspac@u.northwestern.edu.

CS Study Abroad Info Session

'Just Dance' Diversity Celebration

Quarterly Theory Workshop: Fall 2023 Junior Theorists Workshop

Other Events & Opportunities

Recent Investigations in Machine Learning and Edge Computing

ME Alumni Seminar- Jill Prince, NASA

Native American and Indigenous Heritage Month

Become a DTC Project Partner

CS News

NU News