A team approach from NUCATS & NICO brought together faculty from across Northwestern to spark new collaborations—including one team whose idea was awarded $50,000 in seed funding. 🌱👥 @feinberg.northwestern.edu ⬇️

NUCATS x NICO Symposium Sparks Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Feinberg Home > NUCATS Home > About > News & Events > 2026 > NUCATS x NICO Symposium Sparks Multidisciplinary Collaboration A novel, team-focused approach is bringing together faculty from across Northwestern to identify previously unexplored collaboration opportunities.

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"The critical question is not whether AI can 'do' science but whether science—as a social, evolutionary system that generates trustworthy knowledge—survives the way AI does it," write Julio M. Ottino and Brian Uzzi in a new #ScienceEditorial. https://scim.ag/4wDybRP

Level up your AI game. 🕹️ In this episode of The Insightful Leader podcast, Professors Brian Uzzi, Matt Groh and Julio Ottino break down three keys to using AI effectively. Listen now in KelloggInsight: kell.gg/6ad232

How much does it cost to buy your way onto a scientific paper? To answer this question (and better understand the global market for academic reputation manipulation), we compiled BuyTheBy, a massive dataset of thousands of advertisements from paper mills in seven different countries. Link below!

To innovate, business leaders must build bridges between artists and engineers. But where can they start? At Kellogg Insight, Prof. Julio M. Ottino offers three tips to help organizations connect creative and systematic thinkers. kell.gg/a10a11

The Recipe for Innovation? An Alliance Between Art and Science.

Three tips to help organizations build bridges between creative and systematic thinkers.

kell.gg

How do structural inequities across layers of social context drive HIV? This Wednesday, NICO is thrilled to host @michellebirkett.bsky.social from the Feinberg School of Medicine, COMPASS, and @impactinstitute.bsky.social. 🗓️ Wed 4/22 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

Does nature have a universal rhythm? In a new study published in PLOS Biology, NICO researchers Guy Amichay and Daniel Abrams find that communication signals across a wide range of species tend to repeat at about 2 hertz, or roughly two beats per second.

Announcing our spring seminar speakers! Starting April 8th, we are excited to host an interdisciplinary set of talks by researchers from Pitt, CMU, Northwestern, CVG, Leibniz Institute, and UPenn. Join us each Wed at 12pm US Central: bit.ly/WedatNICO #WedatNICO #ComplexSystems #DataScience #AI

Breaking down barriers between disciplines such as art and science is a key component to #innovation, says Julio M. Ottino in @kellogginsight.bsky.social. Business leaders play a role in this by fostering a culture of curiosity. insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/reci...

The Recipe for Innovation? An Alliance Between Art and Science.

Three tips to help organizations build bridges between creative and systematic thinkers.

insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu

Social media and large language models are reshaping scholarly communication. This Wednesday, NICO is excited to host Ágnes Horvát to discuss "The Academic Use of Social Media, LLMs and #AI Assisted Decision-Making". 🗓️ Wed 3/4 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

AI agents are "airplanes for the mind" - check out my latest piece in Nature. The question is not whether machines replace scientists, but what kind of scientist emerges when we learn to fly. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

AI agents are ‘aeroplanes for the mind’: five ways to ensure that scientists are responsible pilots

As artificial-intelligence systems take on more of the scientific workflow, the central goal should not be complete automation, but designing platforms that preserve creativity, responsibility and sur...

nature.com

AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.

Living the metascience dream (or nightmare) with AI for science

What happens when we go from replication crisis to robustness extremes?

open.substack.com

"Transforming Research and Innovation for Acutely Ill Children". This Wed, NICO is thrilled to host Dr. Todd Florin & Dr. Nelson Sanchez-Pinto, to discuss research collaboration between clinicians, engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists. 🗓️ Wed 2/25 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

Do human differences persist and scale when decisions are delegated to #AI agents? This Wednesday, NICO is excited to welcome @aleximas.bsky.social to discuss how the agentic economy can inherit, transform, and may even amplify, human heterogeneity. 🗓️ Wed 2/18 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

🚨 New in @natmachintell.nature.com 🚨 We collected 9000+ annotations of empathic communication in convos from experts, crowds & LLMs across 4 NLP/comms/psych frameworks LLM judgment exceeds crowds' reliability & nearly matches experts Soft skills can now be reliably measured by LLMs 🧵

"Science in the Age of AI". This Wednesday, NICO is thrilled to host @chenhaotan.bsky.social from U of Chicago to share recent advances in #AI enabled hypothesis generation and research evaluation. 🗓️ Wed 2/11 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

I wrote about what it means to keep writing when more language feels like the last thing we need--as a computer scientist, but also as a writer.

Softly, effectively, in the age of AI

On dolphins and disobedience

open.substack.com

Announcing our winter seminar speakers! Starting February 4th, with talks by leading researchers from Yale, U of Chicago, Lurie Children's Hospital, and Northwestern. Join us each Wednesday at 12pm US Central: bit.ly/WedatNICO #WedatNICO #ComplexSystems #DataScience #AI

TONIGHT: We are kicking off the winter with our monthly #DataScience Nights, featuring a talk by Moh Hosseinioun on how #AI is reshaping the practice of science. Students and researchers of all levels are welcome! 📅 1/29 at 5:30pm, Tech M416, Evanston 📷 bit.ly/nico-dsn

Postdoc openings at Kellogg/Northwestern! Review begins Feb 15 (rolling until filled). Apply / details: www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-re...

Happy 2026!!! In the spirit of reflecting on the past year as we begin a new one, I am sharing what our lab has been up to. Read on to learn about the q's we’re asking, find links to papers and media appearances, and see a pic of the lab at a Cubs game!

A new publication in Nature Human Behavior from Brian Uzzi, Dawei Wang and colleagues, explores a large-scale comparison of divergent creativity in humans and large language models. #AI www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Symbiogenesis, Computational Parallelism, and Complexity in Evolution". This Wed, NICO is honored to host @blaiseaguera.bsky.social from Google for our final talk of the fall quarter! Join us in Chambers Hall or online via Zoom. #AI #ComplexSystems 🗓️ Wed 11/12 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

Scientific revolutions have revealed a world of uncertainty, emergence, and interconnection. This Wed, NICO is honored to host Julio M. Ottino to discuss: "The Complexity Revolution: How Scientific Breakthroughs Reshaped Reality and Our Place Within It". 🗓️ Wed 11/05 at 12pm CST 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

AI is booming. And so are the questions about it. Don’t miss this #KelloggInisght roundup of research from some of our faculty experts on the past, present and future of artificial intelligence. Read more: kell.gg/0aa4d8

A very reasonable take on AI in education

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 9mo ago

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

#AI is often framed as a story of replacement, but AI can help make our work more relational, effective, and deeply human. This Wed, NICO is thrilled to host Elizabeth Gerber to discuss "Human–AI Systems That Amplify Human Connection at Work". 🗓️ Wed 10/29 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

It’s notoriously difficulty to evaluate interfaces intended to support creative work. This Wednesday, NICO is thrilled to host @maxkreminski.bsky.social from Midjourney to discuss: "Tracing and Shaping Paths in Design Space". #WedatNICO #AI 🗓️ Wed 10/22 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO

"Artificial intelligence is transforming business, science, marketing, and people's lives". @mattgroh.bsky.social, @dashunwang.bsky.social, and more Kellogg Faculty tell us how we got here and what could be next at Kellogg Insight. kell.gg/5hqk

Take 5: AI’s Past, Present, and Future

Artificial intelligence is transforming business, science, marketing, and labor. Kellogg faculty tell us how we got here and what could be next.

kell.gg

Unconventional uses of data can stimulate creativity and innovation. This Wednesday, NICO is excited to host @patpark.bsky.social from Carnegie Mellon University to discuss: "Back to ‘Data' Science in the Age of AI". #datascience #ai 🗓️ Wed 10/15 at 12pm US Central 🔗 bit.ly/WedatNICO