2026
CAM PHD DISSERTATION DEFENSE: RUITING LIANG
3:00–5:00 pm Jones 111
Friday, April 10, 2026, at 3:00 PM (Central Daylight Time), Location: Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Ave.
Dissertation Presentation and Defense
RUITING LIANG, Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of Chicago
“Assumption-lean uncertainty quantification through exchangeability and algorithmic stability”
Topics
Distinguished Speaker Series: Jon Kleinberg
12:00–1:30 pm Data Science Institute
The University of Chicago Data Science Institute, Department of Statistics, Department of Computer Science, and Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics are proud to announce our 2025-26 Distinguished Speaker Series. Join us for stimulating talks from leading data science and AI researchers exploring and expanding the fundamental methods and applications that transform large and complex datasets into knowledge and action.
Title: Formal Models of Language Generation
Abstract: The emergence of large language models has prompted a surge of interest into theoretical models that might give us insight into both their successes and their shortcomings. We’ll give an overview of recent work in this direction, focusing on a surprising line of positive results that shows it is possible to give guarantees for language-generation algorithms even in the absence of any probabilistic assumptions, in a framework known as “language generation in the limit”. These results suggest interesting notions of “breadth” in language generation, attempting to formalize the idea that different algorithms for this problem might all meet the specification but differ significantly in their expressiveness — in how “richly” they can generate from the underlying language. We also discuss strong contrasts with classical results on language identification, showing a strong sense in which language generation and language learning are fundamentally different as computational problems. The talk will be based on joint work with Sendhil Mullainathan and Fan Wei.
Bio: Jon Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on the interaction of algorithms and networks, the roles they play in large-scale social and information systems, and their broader societal implications. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and he has served on advisory groups including the National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC) and the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and Committee on Science, Technology, and Law (CSTL). He has received MacArthur, Packard, Simons, Sloan, and Vannevar Bush research fellowships, as well as awards including the the Nevanlinna Prize, the World Laureates Association Prize, the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, and the ACM Prize in Computing.
Topics
Statistics, DSI, CAM
CAM PHD DISSERTATION DEFENSE: RONG JIANG
9:30–11:30 am Jones 111
Friday, April 10, 2026, at 9:30 AM (Central Daylight Time), Location: Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Ave.
Dissertation Presentation and Defense
RONG JIANG, Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of Chicago
“Nonparametric Statistics Meets Sequential Decision-Making: Minimax Optimality And Adaptivity”
Topics
CAM Colloquium: Jonathan Mattingly
4:00–5:00 pm Jones 303
THURSDAY, APRIL 9, 2026, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 303, 5747 South Ellis Avenue
JONATHAN MATTINGLY, Department of Mathematics, Duke University
“Batchelor spectrum and unexpected dissipation in a non-autonomous passive scalar flow.”
Topics
Distinguished Speaker Series: Lillian Lee
12:00–1:30 pm Data Science Institute
The University of Chicago Data Science Institute, Department of Statistics, Department of Computer Science, and Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics are proud to announce our 2025-26 Distinguished Speaker Series. Join us for stimulating talks from leading data science and AI researchers exploring and expanding the fundamental methods and applications that transform large and complex datasets into knowledge and action.
Title: Taking a turn for the better? Pivoting and pivotal moments in consequential conversations
Abstract: So much of human interaction occurs as conversations, and it is both fascinating and imperative to analyze them. Recently, my co-authors and I have turned to texting-based conversations between mental-health therapists or crisis counselors and their clients, seeking to identify “key” moments in these exchanges:
(1) A “pivoting” moment corresponds to a *redirection* of the conversation introduced by one party that is accepted/followed by the other. We develop a probabilistic measure of how much an utterance immediately redirects the flow of the conversation, accounting for both the intention and the actual realization of such a change.
(2) In a *pivotal* moment, the conversation’s outcome hangs in the balance: how one responds can put the conversation on substantially diverging trajectories leading to significantly different results. We formalize this intuition by estimating the variance in expectation of outcome depending on what might be said next.
We find significant correlates of our measures in real human conversations on widely-used platforms. For example, the patients in our longer-term mental-health-therapy data who redirected less in their first few sessions were significantly more likely to eventually express dissatisfaction with their therapist and terminate the relationship; and the staff responses in our crisis-counseling data had greater estimated impact on disengagement rates during pivotal moments than in non-.
Joint work with Vivian Nguyen, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Thomas D. Hull, and Sang Min (Dave) Jung.
Bio: Lillian Lee is the Charles Roy Davis professor of computer science at Cornell University. Her research interests include natural language processing and computational social science. She is a AAAI Fellow, an ACL Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. She is a recipient of best paper awards at NAACL 2004 (joint with Regina Barzilay), the IJCAI 2016 “Natural Language Processing Meets Journalism” workshop (joint with Liye Fu and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil), and ACL 2023 (one of three, with Jack Hessel, Ana Marasović, Jena Hwang, Jeff Da, Rowan Zellers, Bob Mankoff, and Yejin Choi); one of three inaugural (2018) NAACL awards for the Test of Time (2002-2012) Paper on Computational Linguistics (joint with Bo Pang) and the 25-year Test of Time award at ACL 2024; and the ACL 2021 Distinguished Service Award for her work with TACL. Her co-authored work has received several mentions in the popular press, including The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and NBC’s The Today Show; and one of her co-authored papers on the memorability of movie quotes was publicly called “boring” by YouTubers Rhett and Link in a video viewed over 2.7 million times.
Topics
Statistics, DSI, CAM
CAM & Stats Student Seminar: Yifan Peng
12:30–1:30 pm DSI 103
Wednesday, April 22 2026, at 4:00 PM (Central Daylight Time), Location: Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Ave.
Dissertation Presentation and Defense
YIFAN PENG, Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of Chicago
“FAST NUMERICAL LINEAR ALGEBRA FOR GENERATIVE MODELING”
Topics
CAM Special Colloquium: Inderjit S. Dhillon
4:00–5:00 pm Kent 107
TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 2026, at 4:00 PM, in Kent Chemical Laboratory, Room 107, 1020 E. 58th St.
Special Colloquium
INDERJIT S. DHILLON, Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin; Google
“CASPR: Combining Axes Preconditioners through Kronecker Approximation for Training Large Neural Networks”
Topics
CAM Colloquium: Bamdad Hosseini
4:00–5:00 pm Jones 303
THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2026, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 303, 5747 South Ellis Avenue
BAMDAD HOSSEINI, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington
“A unifying perspective of scientific machine learning with kernel methods”
Topics
CAM Special Colloquium: Kaibo Hu
4:00–5:00 pm Jones 303
TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2026, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 303, 5747 South Ellis Avenue
Special Colloquium
KAIBO HU, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
“Towards Finite Element Tensor Calculus: from Computational Topological Hydrodynamics to Discrete Geometric Structures”
Topics
Distinguished Speaker Series: Ingrid Daubechies
12:00–1:30 pm Data Science Institute, Room 105
DSI Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series
Ingrid Daubechies, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Duke University
Discovering low-dimensional manifolds in high-dimensional data
March 27 DSI 105 (5460 S University)
lunch 12:00pm, lecture 12:30-1:30pm