2025-26 Distinguished Speaker Series

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.

Events will take place in the Data Science Institute, room 105, with a lunch social starting at noon before the lecture at 12:30 p.m (unless otherwise noted). This page will be updated with talk details in the coming weeks.

November 14: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google – “A Computational View of Life and Intelligence”

February 20: Jeffrey Heer, University of Washington – “Augmenting Data Scientists: The Promise and Peril of AI-Assisted Analysis”

March 27: Ingrid Daubechies, Duke University – “Discovering low-dimensional manifolds in high-dimensional data”

April 9: Lillian Lee, Cornell University – “Taking a turn for the better? Pivoting and pivotal moments in mental-health counseling conversations”

April 10: Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University – “Formal Models of Language Generation”

May 1: Benjamin Recht, University of California, Berkeley

May 22: John Overdeck, Two Sigma