A Symposium on Communication & Intelligence
May 8th, 2026, 8:45 AM - 4:30 PM DSI (Data Science Institute) 105
This symposium is a place to discuss how to think about the intertwining of Communication and Intelligence in an age of machines that talk back. We increasingly interact with technology that attempts (simulates?) communication with humans, rather than just signaling information passively for a user to interpret. While the term “AI” has been around since the 50’s, the explosion of products, services, and bots that create a complex dialogue with their users (and even among themselves!) has created a phase shift in how we interact with machines that wield language. How should we study AI that communicates, rather than just solves a well-defined problem on its own? What are the structures of the new communication networks AI helps create, spanning people, machines, and institutions? What “counts” as communication and can AI help us decompose how it works more clearly? Can machines that communicate help us communicate better? Or are they merely eroding and biasing our human communication by polluting the commons? In this symposium we will discuss how communication and intelligence interact—in humans, in machines, and between them.
Invited Speakers
Call for poster presentations
We invite all researchers and practitioners to submit poster presentations for the Symposium on Communication & Intelligence. This is an opportunity to showcase your work, share insights, and engage in discussions about the intersection of AI and human communication. We are particularly interested in presentations that examine opportunities and challenges to achieve complementary and beneficent AI. Automation will happen inevitably—but where are the opportunities for symbiosis? Poster presenters will have the opportunity to display their posters at the Symposium and engage with fellow attendees during poster sessions. This is a chance to receive feedback, establish collaborations, and contribute to meaningful conversations about the future of interaction between humans and AI.
Abstract submission deadline: April 15th, 2026. Submit your abstract here.
Organization
The organizing committee for the Symposium on Communication & Intelligence are Chenhao Tan, Ari Holtzman, and Dang Nguyen. This event is made possible by the generous support of the Stevanovich Center for Financial Mathematics and the University of Chicago Data Science Institute.
Sponsors
Schedule
Speaker Bio
Dashun Wang is the Kellogg Chair of Technology and a Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. At Kellogg, he is the Founding Director of the Northwestern Innovation Institute, the Founding Co-Director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, and the Founding Director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI). He is also a core faculty member at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His current research focus is the Science of Science, a quest to turn the scientific methods and curiosities upon science itself. He uses and develops tools from complexity sciences and artificial intelligence to broadly explore the opportunities for innovation and promises of prosperity offered by the recent data explosion in science. His research has been published in journals like Nature and Science, and it has been featured in virtually all major global media outlets. Dashun is a recipient of multiple awards for his research and teaching, including the AFOSR Young Investigator award, Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors, Complex Systems Society’s Junior Scientific Award, the Erdos-Renyi Prize, Thinkers50 Radar, and more.
Speaker Bio
John Hewitt is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He is also a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google DeepMind. His research constructs the tools to understand what foundation models learn and how to enforce trustworthiness, safety, and control as models become increasingly capable. He’s particularly happy with his teaching materials for his NLP class, COMS 4705. He received his PhD from Stanford University.
Speaker Bio
Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, also affiliated with the Stanford NLP Group, Stanford HCI Group and Stanford Human Centered AI Institute. Her research focuses on human-centered natural language processing and human-AI interaction. She is a recipient of IEEE “AI 10 to Watch” (2020), Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2021), NSF CAREER Award (2022), an ONR Young Investigator Award (2023), and a Sloan Research Fellowship (2024). Her work has received multiple paper awards or nominations at top NLP and HCI conferences.
Speaker Bio
Tomer Ullman is a cognitive scientist interested in common-sense reasoning, and building computational models for explaining high-level cognitive processes and the acquisition of new knowledge by children and adults. In particular, he is focused on how children and adults come to form intuitive theories of agents and objects, and providing both a functional and algorithmic account of how these theories are learned. Such an account would go a long way towards explaining the basics cogs and springs of human intelligence, and support the building of more human-like artificial intelligence. Dr. Ullman received in B.Sc in Cognitive Science and Physics from Hebrew University in 2008, and his Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2015. From 2015-2018 he was a post-doctoral associate at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.