A four-hour, laptop-open course on building presentations with AI. Participants learn a repeatable workflow that outlasts whichever tool happens to be popular this year, and leave with a defensible deck built on their own material. No technical background or prior AI experience required. Open to staff, grad students, and postdocs from any school.

Registration is required!

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**Virtual Panel**

Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries, creating new markets, and attracting unprecedented levels of investment. But what separates lasting innovation from passing hype?

Join Forge and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IAIM) for a virtual conversation featuring leaders from venture capital, private equity, and technology strategy. Together, they will share how investors evaluate AI opportunities, what trends they are watching across regions and sectors, and where they see the greatest potential impact over the next decade.

Moderated by Ngan MacDonald, the discussion will explore the evolving AI ecosystem, lessons from decades of investing and advising, and offer practical insights for faculty, students, founders, and innovators interested in turning ideas into real-world impact.

Featured Speakers:

- Kaveh Safavi, Adjunct Lecturer, Kellogg School of Management, healthcare strategist, global health executive at Accenture
- Armando Pauker Co-Founder and General Partner, Tensility Venture Partners, an AI-focused venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies
- James Ho, Partner, AEA Investors, with extensive experience in middle-market private equity investing

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Join us for an in-person Summer Speaker Series event featuring Madeline Hinkamp, a technology policy and public sector leader working at the intersection of frontier AI, public policy, and social impact, helping governments, nonprofits, researchers, and communities harness AI responsibly to address real-world challenges while advancing inclusion and opportunity in the technology sector.

A light reception will follow the talk.

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Join us for an in-person Summer Speaker Series event featuring Joseph "Yossi" Keshet, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Technion.

Co-Sponsored by Cognitive Science Program and Department of Linguistics

A light lunch will be provided at the talk.

Title: Key Advances in Speech Technology in the Last Five Years

Abstract:

This talk will provide an overview of the major advances in speech technology over the past five years, focusing on three main areas. First, I will discuss automatic speech recognition (ASR), describing the architectures underlying modern systems, their current performance, and the key challenges that remain. Second, I will cover recent developments in speech synthesis, introducing diffusion-based generative models for text-to-speech synthesis, explaining their underlying principles, and discussing their capabilities, limitations, and open research questions. Finally, I will explore the interplay between speech AI and speech science, examining how modern AI models can contribute to our understanding of speech production and perception, and how insights from speech science can, in turn, improve the interpretability and development of these models.

The presentation is intended to be accessible and interactive rather than highly technical. Questions and discussion are encouraged throughout the talk.

Bio:

Joseph (Yossi) Keshet received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1994 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, in 2008. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with EPFL and the IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Research Assistant Professor with the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), Chicago, IL, USA. Between 2013 and 2022, he was an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Since 2022, he has been an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. His research interests include speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech processing.

Dr. Keshet is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and as an Associate Editor, Senior Area Editor, and currently Deputy Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. He was elected as a Distinguished Lecturer of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) for 2026–2027.

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Great ideas have the potential to transform industries and improve lives, but turning innovation into real-world impact requires more than a breakthrough. What does it take to move a promising concept beyond the research stage and into the hands of users, customers, and communities?

Join us for a virtual conversation featuring Lisa Dhar and Kali Ihde, two leaders with extensive experience helping innovators translate ideas into products, ventures, and scalable solutions.

The discussion will explore the commercialization process, from identifying market opportunities and validating customer needs to securing partnerships, navigating challenges, and building sustainable pathways for growth. Attendees will gain practical insights into how researchers, students, founders, and innovators can transform promising ideas into meaningful impact beyond the university setting.

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Registration is required by August 17th

Data is everywhere in our work, from survey responses and course enrollments to lab measurements, budget spreadsheets, and archival records, but turning it into insight usually requires technical skills that take years to develop. Generative AI changes this equation. With tools like Claude Code, anyone can now explore, clean, and visualize data by describing what they want in plain English.

This tutorial teaches participants how to use Claude Code as a thinking partner for data inspection. By the end of the session, attendees will have explored a real dataset, produced charts and a written report, and developed a reusable workflow they can apply to their own work the next day.

This tutorial is designed for a general Northwestern audience: faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and staff from any discipline. No coding experience is required. Participants from the humanities, social sciences, administration, and STEM fields are equally welcome.

What you will learn:

Participants will leave the workshop able to:

1. Set up and navigate Claude Code with confidence, even without a technical background.

2. Translate research or work questions into effective prompts for data exploration.

3. Inspect, clean, and summarize datasets through natural-language conversation.

4. Generate publication-quality charts and a structured data report.

5. Critically evaluate AI-generated outputs and recognize when to trust them.

6. Iterate on results to refine analyses and uncover deeper patterns.

What participants will take home:

Each participant will leave with a working Claude Code setup, a data report they built themselves, a curated set of reusable prompts for data inspection, and the confidence to apply these skills to their own work immediately.

Requirements:

A laptop (Mac, Windows or Linux), a Claude account. Sample datasets and installation instructions will be provided in advance.

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