When:
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM CT
Where:
Chambers Hall, Ruan Conference Center, 600 Foster St, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Webcast Link
(Hybrid)
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Sydney Hlavaty
sydney.hlavaty@northwestern.edu
Group: Northwestern Network for Collaborative Intelligence (NNCI)
Category: Lectures & Meetings, Academic, Data Science & AI
Join us for an in-person Distinguished Speaker event featuring Jeffrey Ullman, a prominent figure in computer science whose contributions have shaped the foundations of algorithms, databases, and theoretical computing.
Title: "Big-Data Algorithms That Are Not Machine Learning"
Abstract: We shall introduce four algorithms that run very fast on large amounts of data, although typically the answers they give are approximate rather than precise. (1) Locality-sensitive hashing (2) Approximate counting (3) Sampling (4) Counting triangles in graphs.
Lunch will be provided. Registration is required.
Jeff Ullman is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Engineering (Emeritus) in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford and CEO of Gradiance Corp. He received the B.S. degree from Columbia University in 1963 and the PhD from Princeton in 1966. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in 1979, he was a member of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories from 1966-1969, and on the faculty of Princeton University between 1969 and 1979. From 1990-1994, he was chair of the Stanford Computer Science Department. Ullman was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, and has held Guggenheim and Einstein Fellowships. He has received the Sigmod Contributions Award (1996), the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1998), the Knuth Prize (2000), the Sigmod E. F. Codd Innovations award (2006), the IEEE von Neumann medal (2010), the NEC C&C Foundation Prize (2017), and the ACM A.M. Turing Award (2020). He is the author of 16 books, including books on database systems, data mining, compilers, automata theory, and algorithms.