DATA SCIENCE INITIATIVE

Fall 2026 Classes Begin

The NICO Reading Group meets for the first this fall on Wednesday, September 23, 2026. Please contact Jaeseon Ha if you are interested in joining our group.

About:

The NICO Reading Group brings together people across disciplines to read and discuss important ideas in modern AI. We focus on topics such as AI agents, tuning, harnesses, evaluation, AI for scientific discovery, and applications of AI across different fields. The goal is to understand important ideas in AI more deeply by learning and thinking across disciplines.

Leadership:

Jaeseon Ha, a Kellogg MBA + AI student, will lead the reading group during the Fall 2026 term. Please contact Jaeseon with any questions or reach out to us at nico@northwestern.edu.

Meeting Times:

Date: Biweekly on Wednesday evening, starting on September 23, 2026
Time: 6-7pm
Location: NICO main office, Chambers Hall, 
600 Foster St, Evanston, IL 60208

Speaker:

Luis Amaral, Erastus Otis Haven Professor, Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied, McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University

Title:

The World is on Fire. Is it Time to Follow the Science Yet?

Abstract: 

TBA

Speaker Bio:

Luis Amaral, a native of Portugal, conducts and directs research that provides insight into the emergence, evolution, and stability of complex social and biological systems. Amaral received a K-25 Career award from NIGMS, was named to the 2006 class of Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research by the W. M. Keck Foundation and appointed an Early Career Scientist by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2009 to 2015. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, and the Network Science Society.

Amaral has mentored 25+ graduate students and 20+ postdoctoral fellows. He has also held significant mentoring responsibilities for dozens of undergraduate and high-school students who completed internships in his lab. Amaral’s research has been published in leading scientific journals, including Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, Nature Physics, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Machine Intelligence, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review X, PLOS Biology, and eLife. These results reported in the publications have been featured in numerous media sources, both in the US and abroad.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/94166965463

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

Speaker:

Kristina Lerman, Professor of Informatics, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University

Title:

Social Dynamics of Human-Algorithm Interactions Amplify Social Dysfunction

Abstract: 

Social media platforms have achieved remarkable success by predicting what users will click, watch, share, and engage with. Yet algorithmic feeds have also been implicated in rising polarization, growing psychological distress, and the erosion of social trust. How can systems so effective at predicting human behavior produce outcomes poorly aligned with human welfare? I introduce algorithmic misalignment as a framework for understanding this puzzle. Recommendation algorithms are optimized to predict observable behavior, but behavioral signals are imperfect proxies for what people actually want or value. Moreover, optimization favors behaviors that are easiest to predict—often fast, reactive, and emotionally driven responses. Feedback loops reinforce these tendencies as algorithmic recommendations shape behavior that subsequently becomes algorithmic training data, allowing subtle human biases to scale into collective outcomes. I illustrate this framework through two case studies. In political discourse, algorithms amplify anger, outrage, and out-group hostility, contributing to affective polarization. Interactions between groups then transform animosity into durable partisan disagreements. In mental health, algorithmic feeds amplify social comparison, envy, and status anxiety, with consequences for body image and eating disorders. Although typically studied separately, these outcomes may share a common structural origin in the interaction between human psychology and algorithmic optimization, suggesting new directions for designing healthier human–algorithm ecosystems.

Speaker Bio:

Kristina Lerman is a Professor of Informatics at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering.  Trained as a physicist, she uses AI, machine learning and network science to answer questions in computational social science, including how algorithms and online platforms shape social behavior and human psychology, access to information, attention, and social-emotional support. Her work has been covered by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. She is a fellow of AAAI.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/93389536671

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

Speaker:

Timothy Tangherlini, Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education, Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley

Title:

Chat Agents, Conspiracy Theory & Threat Narratives: Cultural Analytics and Narrative at Scale

Abstract: 

In this talk, I present current work on the intersection of conspiracy theory and narratives of threat, with the shifting terrain of chat bots increasingly influencing the social media ecosystem. I present a generative model of narratives of threat, explore aspects of stance detection and the narrative sorting of actants and institutions into "insiders" and "outsiders." I then explore the topology of conspiracy theory as a narrative predilection for  a comprehensive explanation of allegedly witnessed or experienced phenomena along with inferences about connections based on a monologic world view. Using examples from earlier political social media discussions, and updating these observations in the context of contemporaneous debates about the role of AI in society allow for insight into the thicket of connections that characterize the ongoing negotiation of belief through narrative

Speaker Bio:

Timothy R. Tangherlini, Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair of Undergraduate Education, is a Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Folklore Archive.  He has worked on computational approaches to folklore, with an emphasis on stories and storytelling over the past three decades. Under the auspices of the NSF's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, he co-directed a program on Culture Analytics, as well as an NEH Institute on Network Analysis for the Humanities. He is the author of several books, and various articles. He has done extensive fieldwork on storytelling among paramedics, and shamanism in South Korea, as well as archival work on rural 19th century Denmark. His current work focuses on generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumor, personal experience narratives, and conspiracy theories, as well as understanding cultural phenomena such as dance and cuisine across many scales of analysis.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95645191725

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

Speaker:

Andreia Sofia Teixeira, Associate Professor, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University London

Title:

Human Relational Ecology and Conversational AI: From Social Actor to Asymmetric Co-Regulation

Abstract: 

Human cognition, mental health and relationships unfold within interconnected social systems that change over time. Drawing on work on cognitive-affective structure, the evolution of supportive and conflictual ties in adolescent social networks, and distinct social envirotypes associated with mental health and context-dependent patterns of brain connectivity, I will discuss what these different perspectives tell us about the human relational ecology in which wellbeing is embedded, including the role of co-regulation in shaping emotion, cognition and behaviour.

Understanding this ecology is especially important as conversational AI emerges as a new kind of social actor. These systems can simulate some of the interactional signals associated with co-regulation, including responsiveness, validation, emotional language and apparent empathy, but without reciprocal lived experience, vulnerability, embodiment or shared accountability. I will introduce the concept of asymmetric co-regulation to frame this distinction.

Building on emerging work at the intersection of AI use, social networks and real-world human–AI conversations, I will ask what happens when conversational AI moves beyond instrumental use and starts to occupy more relational roles: when it may scaffold or substitute for existing human capacities and forms of support, how repeated interactions may shape regulation and sense of agency over time, and how these dynamics may become embedded within wider social relationships.

Speaker Bio:

Andreia Sofia Teixeira is an Associate Professor at the Network Science Institute, Northeastern University London, where she leads the BRAN Lab (Behavioral Research and Adaptive Networks). Her research sits at the intersection of network science and machine learning, developing measures, computational models and simulation frameworks to understand the structure and dynamics of complex systems, and how local behaviour can spill over to collective scales. Her work spans human–AI interaction, collective behaviour, cognitive and affective networks, signed and temporal social networks, mental health and neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Across these areas, she is particularly interested in how individual states, relationships and broader social environments shape one another over time.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98367624907

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.