Boston Computation Club
The Boston Computation Club is a small seminar group focused on mathematical computer science and computational mathematics. It is named after the London Computation Club and meets roughly every other week on weekends around 5pm EDT, depending on speaker availability. Each meeting typically features a 20-minute presentation followed by 40 minutes of discussion. Some sessions are posted on YouTube and in podcast form.
Episodes
Sum-check protocol: categorical view, Alex Sorokin
Alex is a friend of mine and a mathematician. He did his PhD in mathematics with other Alex (Martsinkovsky), who has presented at the seminar group previously. We're huge fans of both Alexes at the Boston Computation Club and we hope you enjoy this talk as much as we did!
P-stability for 3-uniform Hypergraphs, Daniel Yu
Today Daniel Yu gave a pure math talk on an extension he performed independently of work he had conducted during his math semester abroad in Budapest.
Understanding patterns of adoption and adaptation of open models on local systems, Woohyeuk (Kevin) Lee
Today Woohyeuk (Kevin) Lee joined us to discuss local AI (and the question of just how local it really is). This is exciting work at the intersection of computer science and social science! Enjoy.
Cellular automata and artificial life in the deep learning era, Casey Martin
Casey Martin is a dirtbag intellectual, local savant, and recent PhD in the Boulder metro area. He's a party favorite and today he joined us to discuss cellular automata and their generalizations. Enjoy!
06/26/26: Tracing Introspection Across Model Depth, Zach Maas
Zach Maas is an independent AI safety & mechanistic interpretability researcher in Boulder, Colorado, funded by Coefficient Giving. Today Zach joined us to talk about some of his recent work tracing introspection across model depth. This is, I think, the first mech interp talk we've hosted other than ChessGPT, and it was a good one! We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
An Extremely Short Proof of the Hairy Ball Theorem with Peter McGrath
Today Peter McGrathAn Extremely Short Proof of the Hairy Ball Theorem. Peter is a professor of mathematics at NC State, where he researches geometric analysis, minimal surfaces, PDEs. Today's talk was an elegant presentation of the classical result -- Peter makes it accessible, and explains each concept in a clear and transparent manner. This was a really fun talk and really back to our roots
Logic.py: Bridging the Gap between LLMs and Constraint Solvers with Pascal Kesseli
Pascal Kesseli is a software engineer and technical lead at Microsoft AI, with a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford (or a DPhil? Or whatever they call PhDs on that side of the pond). Today Pascal joined us to discuss work he completed while at META FAIR, focused on the conjoining of large language models with symbolic reasoning systems (ultimately, dispatch to SAT) as well as future research dire
2/17/26: Approximately Aligned Decoding with Daniel Melcer
Daniel Melcer is a PhD student at Northeastern University, where he researches formal methods, reinforcement learning, and large language models, among other things. Daniel also has the most colorful hair in the business (bright red for this talk, other colors for other occasions). Today he joined us to talk about some really exciting work he completed at Amazon, and to expand on his general visio
02/06/26: Early experiments in FMxAI at Galois with Max von Hippel
Max von Hippel is ... me, the organizer and founder of the Boston Computation Club. Today I hosted an extremely informal event to chat about some of the early experiments in FMxAI I was involved with at Galois, two years ago.
VeriExploit: Automatic Bug Reproduction in Smart Contracts via LLMs and Formal Methods, Chenfeng Wei
Chenfeng Wei is a PhD student at the University of Manchester, where he researches formal guarantees for large language models. Today he joined us to talk about his latest work exploring bugs in smart-contracts. This is a really interesting project at the intersection of explainable AI, smart contract debugging/security, and cybersecurity/symbolic analysis, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we di
Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths - Xiao Mao
Today Xiao Mao joined us to discuss his groundbreaking work, Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths. It's not every day you beat Djikstra at something. This was a good one. Thank you for talking to us, Xiao!
Infecting Generative AI with Viruses - David A. Noever and Forrest McKee
David A. Noever and Forrest McKee are researchers at PeopleTec, where they work on problems at the intersection of security, defense, and AI/ML. Today David joined us to present their joint work Infecting Generative AI with Viruses. This was a really great presentation that took a rigorous approach to defining the security boundaries and limitations of AI tools, and it fostered one of the better
08/15/25: An LLM Agent for Functional Bug Detection in Network Protocols with Mingwei Zheng
Mingwei Zhenga Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, advised by Prof. Xiangyu Zhang since 2021. Before that, she received her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Technology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2020. Mingwei's research lies at the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Software Engineering. She builds LLM ag
08/01/25: Formal Reasoning Meets LLMs: Toward AI for Mathematics and Verification with Kaiyu Yang
Today Kaiyu Yang from Meta joined us to discuss formal reasoning using LLMs, particularly in the context of interactive theorem provers. This is a really fast-moving and exciting field in which reinforcement learning and theorem proving combine to provide a new frontier for fully automated reasoning, and Kaiyu is at the bleeding edge of it. We were really lucky to get an hour of Kaiyu's time
07/25/25: RefinedC: Automating the Foundational Verification of C Code with Refined Ownership Types with Michael Sammler
Michael Sammlern assistant professor leading the Programming Languages and Verification Group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Today he joined us to talk about his three primary projects: RefinedC, which uses a refinement and ownership type system to verify C code, Islaris, which shows how to scale verification of assembly code to realistic models of real-world architectu
06/20/25: TypeScript Types Can Run DOOM with Dimitri Mitropoulos
Dimitri Mitropoulos is a Michigan-based typescript dev, linguist, and classicist who joined us to talk about his completely unhinged, odyssean, and frankly just unwise project to get DOOM running completely within Typescript's type system. Someone give the dude a PhD, please.
06/13/25: Gradual Verification with Jenna DiVincenzo
Jenna DiVincenzo is an Assistant Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering @ Purdue University. She is broadly interested in research spanning software verification, programming languages, and software engineering, especially research aimed at making verification techniques and programming languages more usable and scalable. Today Jenna joined us to talk about he
05/07/25: Exploring Zero-Shot Prompting for Generating Data Format Descriptions, Prashant Anantharaman
Prashant Anantharaman is a long-time BCC group member and has presented as both a solo researcher and a panelist to prior events. Today he joined us to present some of his work with NARF, to appear at IEEE S&P, on generating grammars for fuzzing using LLMs. This is a super exciting new frontier for LLMs and LangSec generally and his talk was wonderful.
04/18/25: Descriptive Complexity with Ramit Das
Ramit Das is a formal verification engineer at Intel and an avid Boston Computation Club group member. Ramit and I have been speaking for ages about formal methods, exchanging papers, etc. and today he finally agreed to come give a talk to the group about his area of expertise -- descriptive complexity. This was a really fun talk and an excellent introduction for anyone looking to get their feet w
03/21/24: How and Why to extend First Order Logic for Knowledge-Based Systems with Marc Denecker
Today Marc Denecker joined us to present How and Why to extend First Order Logic for Knowledge-Based Systems. This presentation provided the setup for a follow-on that Marc's student Simon Vandevelde is set to give on IDP-Z3, a formal reasoning machine that Marc and Simon have built. This was a really interesting talk touching on a variety of forms for formal logic, decision procedures, and in
04/04/25: Constrained Decoding for Code Language Models via Efficient Left and Right Quotienting of Context-Sensitive Grammars with Daniel Melcer
Today Daniel Melcer joined us to present Constrained Decoding for Code Language Models via Efficient Left and Right Quotienting of Context-Sensitive Grammars (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.17988). This is work he completed while at Amazon, and it's a really interesting project around how to constrain, guide, and check language models such that they generate valid code within a given context. We r
03/08/25: An Introduction to LiquidHaskell with Michael H. Borkowski
Michael H. Borkowski is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Before joining Purdue, he earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he was affiliated with the ProgSys Group. Today Michael joined us to discuss LiquidHaskell, a very cool project that incorporates a kind of refinement types, w
01/10/25: Combining Causal Inference and Knowledge Graphs with Brook Santangelo and John Sterrett
Today Brook Santangelo and John Sterrett
01/04/25: Hacking GenAI with LLM Red Teaming and Beyond with Gaspard Baye
Gaspard Baye is a Cyber AI Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he researches AI-driven offensive and defensive security applications. Today Gaspard joined us to present "Hacking GenAI with LLM Red Teaming and Beyond" based on his recent DefCon talk. This was a really fun event with a great Q&A. Thanks to Jacob from the Trust Lab for hosting!
11/30/24: LB4TL: A Smooth Semantics for Temporal Logic to Train Neural Feedback Controllers with Navid Hashemi
Navid Hashemi recently defended his PhD at USC and is about to begin a post-doc at Vanderbilt. His research focuses on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Temporal Logics, with applications in Formal Verification of Learning Enabled Systems and Neurosymbolic Reinforcement Learning. Today Navid joined us for a really exciting presentation about his work on metrizable logics for reinfo
11/17/24: When Static Analysis Meets Large Language Models with Chengpeng Wang
Chengpeng Wangworking with Prof. Xiangyu Zhang. His research focuses on program analysis, especially software analysis, and in particular how existing analysis techniques intersect with emerging approaches from AI such as Large Language Models. Today Chengpeng joined us to talk about his recent NeurIPS paper proposing a novel static analysis technique based on LLMs. The technique is very interest
10/05/24: Abuse-Resistant Location Tracking: Balancing Privacy and Safety in the Offline Finding Ecosystem with Harry Eldridge
Harry Eldridge is a Cryptography PhD student at Johns Hopkins, advised by Abhishek Jain and Matthew Green. His research (so far) touches on security and privacy implications of commodity hardware, which is a fascinating topic deserving of the mathematically disciplined, cryptographically informed approach his lab takes to such problems. Today Harry joined us to talk about his research into the pro
09/28/24: Hacking an LLM Using the Z3 Theorem Prover with Ian Bicking
Ian Bicking is an engineer at Brilliant, which is also what he is. (Sorry, dad joke). Ian joined us today to talk about his super charming (and extremely interesting) weekend of experiments hacking various LLMs to solve puzzles using z3. The presentation was roughly the first 2/3 of the event and the remaining third presented a fantastic conversation about the future of AI, tool use, chain and tr
09/07/24: Shaken, not Stirred -- Automated Discovery of Subtle Attacks on Protocols using Mix-Nets with Dhekra Mahmoud
Dhekra Mahmoudat LIMOS in Clermont-Ferrand, France, where she researches the formal analysis of cryptographic protocols under the supervision of Pascal Lafoucade and Jannik Dreier. Today Dhekra joined us to present her recent USENIX paper Shaken, not Stirred -- Automated Discovery of Subtle Attacks on Protocols using Mix-Nets. This was a really interesting presentation with a good conversation aft
08/25/24: An Introduction to Lurk with Matej Panciak
Matej Panciak holds a PhD in mathematics and is a software engineer at the Argument Computer Corporation, where among other things, he works on Lurk. Lurk is a LISP for defining computations that can prove (in the ZKP sense) that they ran, which is probably useful for all sorts of cool things we haven't thought of yet, but right now, is pretty important for doing stuff on-chain. (I can easily
08/17/24: Efficient Synthesis of Symbolic Distributed Protocols by Sketching with Derek Egolf
Derek Egolf is a PhD student (since 2021) at Northeastern University, advised by Stavros Tripakis. His primary research focus is the automatic generation of correct-by-construction systems from high-level specifications (synthesis). Today Derek talked about his recent paper in this vein, Efficient Synthesis of Symbolic Distributed Protocols by Sketching, to appear in FMCAD. This was a very intere
08/10/24: Radically Better Academic Search With Undermind with Joshua Ramette
Joshua Ramette (https://x.com/RametteJoshua) recently completed a PhD in physics at Mass Tech, and today he joined us to talk about his new project, Undermind. Josh and his friend Tom Hartke (https://www.tomhartke.com/) founded Undermind (YC S24) to radically improve academic literature search using a mixture of AI techniques. Their system is slow, deliberate, and very high quality. You can check
07/27/24: Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Evan Pu
Evan Pu ( https://evanthebouncy.github.io/ , @evanthebouncy on X ) is a senior research scientist at Autodesk AI Lab, working on code-generation for human-machine collaboration in CAD, and industry scale instruction-following dataset annotation. Today Evan joined us from a toilet (with the lid closed) so as not to wake up his wife due to a rather large time-zone delta, which was hilarious and a fi
07/06/24: The Algebraic Structure of Infinite Craft with Arthur O’Dwyer
Arthur O’Dwyer is a C++ programmer and blogger who today joined us to talk about his musings on the algebraic structure of the popular web-game Infinite Craft. Infinite Craft is a clever little experiment in sandboxed exploration, and it turns out to give rise to a rather complex mathematical structure with some interesting background in theoretical CS. Arthur covered all this and more in his pres
06/22/24: npm install everything with Evan Boehs
Evan Boehs is a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT who broke the freaking internet. What more do I need to say? Hire this kid. Maybe I will. It's a race.
Evan made an npm package called everything which installs everything. Then he got stuck in a dependency loop when someone tried to delete something. It turns out this is a nearly impossible problem to solve and he totally broke npm. Then a bunch o
06/08/24: Compressing a JSON Parser Beyond Comprehension with June Marcuse
June Marcuse
04/20/24: Chess-GPT's Internal World Model with Adam Karvonen
Adam Karvonen was my coworker at Galois and is a bright guy doing really interesting stuff in the ML interpretability space. Today he joined us to present his work on Chess-GPT, you guessed it, a GPT model that can play chess. The punchline isn't so much how good the model is as it is how the model "thinks" -- Adam provides compelling evidence that the model internally reasons about
04/12/24: DY Fuzzing: Formal Dolev-Yao Models Meet Cryptographic Protocol Fuzz Testing with Max Ammann
Max Ammann is a cybersecurity researcher at Trail of Bits, where he's recently been working on extending his Master's thesis work on fuzzing cryptographic protocols into an industrial-grade fuzzing tool. That work resulted in an S&P publication which is what he joined us to present today. This was a really good talk but also a great discussion, in large part because of the highly engag
04/23/24: Pegasus Panel
For this event, Holmes Wilson of Fight for the Future moderated a panel retrospective on the Pegasus malware. Our panelists were:
- Jonathan Rugman: Foreign Affairs Correspondent at Channel 4 News, BAFTA Award-winning journalist, visiting lecturer at University of London, and Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI.
- Raya Sharbain: education and communities coordinator at the Tor Project, and digital rig
03/08/24: Bitwuzla with Mathias Preiner
Mathias Preiner is a Research Scientist at Stanford University in the Centaur lab. He is one of the main developers of the SMT solver Boolector (since June 2012) and Bitwuzla -- which is what he joined us to discuss today. This was a good talk, but an excellent Q&A, and we really enjoyed it. Thanks Mathias for joining us today, and to the awesome audience for showing up with such deep and tec
01/13/24: How to Fund your Projects by Remembering One Number with Joe Shiraef
Joe Shiraef is a professional card counter and indie game dev. Today he joined us for a very fun, free-form conversation on advantage play, indie game development, avoid arrest, and pursuing your passions.
https://www.inktalestudios.com/
12/15/23: Q&A on Puzzles, with Roger Barkan in conversation with Jacob Denbeaux
Today puzzle-maker Roger Barkan joined us to talk about the creation and solution of cave puzzles, a category of puzzle for which he's quite famous as a puzzle author. Jacob lead the conversation, using an interactive puzzle that he implemented with the help of ChatGPT (:0), and it was a ton of fun. We're super grateful to Roger for joining us today and we look forward to doing a follow-up
11/19/23: Semi Open-Source Robotics with Jan Hennecke
Jan Hennecke is an engineer and roboticist in Boston, MA. Jan has been a buddy of mine for ages, ever since we met at the Bernardo Faria Jiu Jitsu Academy where he told me a hilarious story about placing top-3 in his first half ironman while munching down on snickers. Today Jan joined us to talk about his work at RBTX, a marketplace and platform for low-cost automation. This was a really fun talk
11/04/23: Logic in Color with Christian Williams
Today Christian Williams joined us to talk about his dissertation project, Logic in Color. This is a really exciting project which he is now working on post-graduation, which aims to re-frame the way we think about logic, and logics, using a largely visual medium. The key insight is that certain mathematical observations are made completely obvious simply by adding color to the areas enclosed by
10/21/23: How to Write a Coequation, with Todd Schmid
Todd Schmidan Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of St. Mary's College of California. They are generally intereted in the algebraic, coalgebraic, and logical foundations of program semantics, and recently completed a PhD as a part of the PPLV group in the Computer Science Department of University College London. Today Todd joined us to talk about coequations, a fascinating
10/07/23: Artificial Intelligence, Openness, and "Existential" Risk: Well Informed Vibes on What is Hype and What is Real, with Avijit Ghosh, David Widder, and Fabio Tollon, moderated by Wei Sun
Avijit Ghosh is a Research Data Scientist at AdeptID and a Lecturer in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He's a good friend of mine and was an element of my PhD cohort at Northeastern. He's also a well-respected researcher at the intersection of machine learning, ethics, and policy. You can read about some of his innovative and cross-disciplinary work, for
09/17/23: Open Problems in Probabilistic Programming Semantics with Eli Sennesh
Eli Sennesh is a recent graduate of the PhD program in computer science at Northeastern, in which I (Max) and many other BCC group members are currently enrolled. Eli's research is highly interdisciplinary, taking into consideration various topics in mathematics (statistics, measure theory, probability theory, optimization), programming language theory, and neuroscience, with the unifying goal
09/09/23: Transferable and Fixable Proofs with Bill Dalessandro
Bill Dalessandro is a philosopher of science and mathematics at Oxford University. Today Bill joined us to discuss proofs -- specifically, what it means for a proof to be fixable, what it means for a proof to be transferable, and the apparent tension between these notions. This work built on prior work by Northeastern's Don Fallis, who attended the talk and participated in the lively and fasci
09/01/23: ChipSec with Nathaniel Mitchell and Dan Scott
Today Nathaniel Mitchell and Dan Scott joined us from Intel to discuss the ChipSec project, an open-source platform security assessment framework, available at https://github.com/chipsec/chipsec . Specifically, ChipSec "is a framework for analyzing the security of PC platforms including hardware, system firmware (BIOS/UEFI), and platform components" -- for both Windows and Linux (althou
08/12/23: Packing Chromatic with Bernardo Anibal Subercaseaux Roa
Bernardo Anibal Subercaseaux RoaMarijn Heule. He has a background in engineering and is passionate about mathematics and computer science. Bernardo's research attacks the following question from a variety of angles: what can and cannot be done (efficiently?) by a computer? Today, Bernardo joined us to talk about Packing Chromatic, a fascinating research area at the intersection of pure mathem
07/15/23: Symmetries, Flat Minima, and the Conserved Quantities of Gradient Flow with Bo Zhao
Bo Zhao is a 2nd year PhD student in computer science at UCSD, advised by Rose Yu. Her research focuses on deep learning theory and optimization, with a recent emphasis on the parameter space and dynamics of learning. Today Bo joined us to talk about her recent paper, "Symmetries, Flat Minima, and the Conserved Quantities of Gradient Flow", which was joint work at ICLR with Iordan Ganev
06/30/23: ChatGPT on your Personal Corpus in Algovera with Richard Blythman
Today Richard Blythman joined us to talk about the big and exciting world of large language models. Richard has a PhD in fluid dynamics and is the CEO of Algovera, a cool company building a decentralized and personalized tech stack based on LLMs. His talk today was short and focused, explaining what in particular makes LLMs so magical. Then we had a phenomenal discussion section! We hope you en
06/23/23: MariusGNN with Roger Waleffe
Roger Waleffe is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working under the supervision of Prof. Theodoros (Theo) Rekatsinas (now at ETH Zurich). A few months ago one of our group members (Brennon) saw Rover's talk at EuroSys and thought it was pretty rad, so we invited Roger to give the same talk to the Club today. (You can decide, what's more prestigious,
06/16/23: Infinite Games -- Strategies, Logic, Theory, and Computation, with Joel David Hamkins
Joel David Hamkins is a mathematician and logician at Oxford, where he studies the logic of the infinite. Today Joel joined us to talk about infinite dimensional games. As Joel explained, there are really three areas of mathematical inquiry related to games: Game Theory, as traditionally used in economics, ecology, etc.; the Theory of Games, which many CS students learn a little bit of in Complexi
05/20/23: A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing, with Shriram Krishnamurthi
Shriram Krishnamurthi is a professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he researches (among other things) programming languages, software engineering, formal methods, HCI, security, and networking. Today Shriram joined us to discuss his joint project with Kathi Fisler, Benjamin S. Lerner, and Joe Gibbs Politz, titled "A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing". The project
04/29/23: Q&A on the Philosophy of Games with Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen, in conversation with Wei Sun
Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and the author of Games: Agency as Art. Today he joined us to discuss his book, which covers the philosophy of all sorts of games: rock climbing, Dark Souls, judo, poker, dungeons and dragons, etc. The event took the form of an interview hosted by Wei Sun, a longtime group member who read Thi's book in detail and
04/21/23: Quantity Calculus in Natural Language Semantics with Elizabeth Coppock
Elizabeth Coppock is a linguistics professor at BU. He research focuses on foundational topics in truth, reference, quantification, and measurement in natural language semantics, through the lens of specific empirical puzzles. Recently, one of our group members (Cheng Zhang) expressed interest in Elizabeth's work as it might relate to his own research in programming languages, so we reached ou
03/17/23: The Process, Challenges, Struggles & Joys of Creating "How to Design Programs" with Matthias Felleisen
Matthias is a world-class scientist and highly influential computer programmer, and also the author of "How to Design Programs", a Computer Science 101 book which takes a fundamentally different approach than prior works. Today Matthias joined us to share his experience writing that book (and its many iterations), as well as his broader philosophy on how to instruct the next generation o
03/03/23: Reversing UK Rail Tickets with eta
eta is a phenomenally talented polymath, hacker, and computer programmer from the UK. Today eta joined us to discuss her very fun project reverse engineering UK rail tickets. This was a fun event with a reasonably big audience and lots of Q&A, and we really enjoyed it! It was also a good example of the best possible outcome in hacking: you break something, you tell the people
02/13/23: Web3 is Going Just Great with Molly White
Molly White is a Northeastern alum, a software engineer, and now, a web3 researcher (researching all the stuff that stinks about web3, to be clear). Today Molly joined us to talk about her ongoing project and perhaps magnum opus, Web3 is Going Just Great (web3isgoingjustgreat.com), an ongoing history of all the grifts, thefts, hacks, and crashes in Web3/the broader blockchain ecosystem. &nbs
02/03/23: How to Give a Good Mathematical Presentation with Anthony Bonato
Anthony Bonato is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Toronto Metropolitan University. Anthony's research focuses on graph theory, with applications to real-world complex networks and pursuit-evasion games on graphs such as Cops and Robbers. However, today Anthony joined us not to present some groovy new results in graph theory, but rather, to discuss how one _might_ give such a presen
01/29/23: Implications of Model-Based Phil/Sci for ML with Mel Andrews
Mel Andrews is an instructor and doctoral student in the department of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. Their work focuses on the phenomena of cognition and life, comparing and contrasting the merits and explanatory scope of conceptual and formal models of life and mind, and exploring the implications of these considerations for science at large. Today Mel joined us to talk
01/06/23: Q&A: AppSec from OWASP to Present with John Viega
John Viega is the Executive Vice President of Products, Strategy, & Engineering at SilverSky, an Adjunct Professor at NYU Poly, former editor-in-chief for IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, co-developer of GCM (a mode of operation for block ciphers such as AES), and the original author of Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager. He's also the founder of CrashOverride, a stealthy new secur
12/03/22: Depths of Wikipedia with Annie Rauwerda
Annie Rauwerda is an internet personality and polymath with a background in neuroscience and data science. She is also the host and operator of Depths of Wikipedia, a phenomenally popular meme page, Depths of Wikipedia, which you can read about HERE on Wikipedia. Annie is also herself a frequent Wikipedia editor and author. Today she joined us to talk about how Wikipedia can be c
11/19/22: Nearly Optimal Property Preserving Hashing with LakYah Tyner
LakYah Tyner is a 1st year PhD student at Northeastern University co-advised by abhi Shelat and Daniel Wichs. Her research focuses on cryptography, with recent works involving Property Preserving Hashing and Threshold Signature Schemes. Put differently, she's accomplished considerably more in less than a year of graduate school than I did as a first year (we're a semester in and she ha
10/14/22: Cryptography with Quantum States with William Kretschmer
William Kretschmer is a PhD student at the University of Texas Austin, advised by Scott Aaronson. He's one of these pseudo-celebrity-grad-students with lots of cool splashy results and we're stoked that he took the time to talk to us today. The talk primarily covered the basics of quantum cryptography, much of which should be familiar to regular group members who attended our quantum c
06/19/22: Assessing Recycling, Displacement, and Environmental Impacts using an Economics-Informed Material System Model, with John Ryter
John Ryter is my lead partner in Cambridge MA, a gnarly climber, and also a PhD student in materials science at MIT (aka MassTech) where he studies recycling using a unique combination of economic theory and environmental modeling. John's work has entertained me during countless climbing sessions and now it can equally enthrall you, via the magic of the Internet. We were very happy to
05/20/22: Hybrid Systems: Not Just For Cars Anymore! With Kimberly Ayers
Kimberly Ayers is an assistant professor of mathematics at Cal State San Marcos, where she studies the mathematics of hybrid systems. Kimberly is a genuine theorist (in contrast to us computer science neanderthals, haha) and this talk touched on some of the aspects of hybrid systems that make them theoretically interesting (e.g., how the topology imposed on a skew flow can apparently b
05/13/22: The Generalized Star Height Problem with Jean-Eric Pin
Roughly four years ago, when I took second semester Abstract Algebra at the University of Arizona, my professor (Jay Taylor) generously offered to meet with me every week outside class to discuss algebraic topics in computer science. We chose Dr. Pin's book, Varieties of Formal Languages. Due to my own mathematical immaturity we worked through the material slowly, and didn't finish the
05/07/22: Math Café #3: Prep for Dr. Pin's Talk with Max von Hippel
Plagiarizing Wikipedia: "Jean-Éric Pin is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to the algebraic automata theory and semigroup theory." He will also be our featured guest in a week, presenting The Generalized Star Height Problem. In advance of his talk, he requested that the audience familiarize themselves with some basic mathematical def
04/15/22: When Memory Guards are Crooked and Become Speculating Snitches with Andrea Mambretti
Andrea Mambretti is a system security researcher at IBM Research Europe, Zurich Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from Northeastern University, in the SecLab under the supervision of Engin Kirda. Since 2011, he's participated in several CTF competitions (Ictf, Ructf, Defcon and others) with both the TowerOfHanoi and Shellphish teams. (Audience members will surely fall into two pa
03/20/22: An Open Conversation on Web3 with the SpiceDAO
The SpiceDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) which recently purchased a copy of the "Dune Bible", namely, the elusive and rare storyboard script for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s DUNE film. As big Dune fans ourselves, and also as nerds interested in both the failures and opportunities of Web3, we were enormously excited to meet with a representative of SpiceDAO and discuss all thin
03/12/22: Live Coding: Making a Wordle Scraper and Solver with Jacob Denbeaux
Jacob is a mathematician, computer scientist, and notably, co-organizer of the Boston Computation Club. Today he joined us to give an interactive lesson on web-scraping, with Worlde-solving as a motivating case study. This was a fun exercise and one we will almost certainly follow up on in the future. We worked through parsing the ... DOM? Is that the right word? IDK.
03/05/22: Seize the Means of Computation: the Big Tech Disassembly Manual with Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. In my circles, he's probably best known for his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Boing Boing, but he's also a renowned science fiction author in his own right, an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practi
02/17/22: Quantum Computing in Plato's Cave with Daniel Burgarth
Daniel Burgarth is an associate professor of mathematics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where he studies a host of interesting things including various kinds of quantum systems. Today he joined us to discuss his 2014 Nature paper "Quantum Computing in Plato's Cave", which studied the complexity of quantum computers through a mathematically and philosophically structured lens.
02/06/22: Trojan Source Attacks with Nicholas Boucher
Nicholas Boucher is a PhD student in computer science studying under Professor Ross Anderson at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He is also one of the authors of Trojan Source Attacks, a paper (and CVE, and vulnerability class) which highlighted supply-chain vulnerabilities in open-source software (among other things) due to code that is different than it looks. This is one of the mo
01/08/22: Covert C2 Channels with Kai Bernardini
Kai Bernardini is a professional hacker/security researcher, a mathematician, and and a lecturer in computer science at Boston University. He's also better than me at lead belay (no short-roping from Kai!). Today Kai joined us to discuss covert command and control (C2) channels. Sure, your communication might be indistinguishable from random noise. But is it indistinguishab
12/04/21: Feynman Integrals for a Mathematical Audience with Matthew von Hippel
Matt von Hippel is (a) my cousin and (b) a professor at the Niels Bohr International Academy in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he researches scattering amplitudes in gauge and gravity theories. Matt received his PhD in 2014 from SUNY Stony Brook, and from 2014 to 2017 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Perimeter Institute. Today Matt joined us to discuss Feynman integrals. Apparentl
12/03/21: Aesthetic and Organic Complexity with Tyler Hobbs & Bill Cresco, moderated by Anya & Joe
Tyler Hobbs is a generative artist from Austin, Texas. Bill Cresco is a geneticist who specializes in quantitative evolutionary genomics at the University of Oregon. Today Tyler and Bill joined us for a wide-ranging discussion, seeded by the topic of "complexity". The conversation was fascilitated by our two excellent moderators, Anya and Joe. Anya studied studio art and en
10/24/21: An Extensible and Modular Design and Implementation of Monte Carlo Tree Search for the JVM with Larkin Liu & Jun Tao Luo
Larkin Liu is an operations research (OR) & machine learning (ML) specialist, currently completing a PhD in Operations Research under the advisement of Stefan Minner at the Technical University of Munich. Today Larkin joined us to present *An Extensible and Modular Design and Implementation of Monte Carlo Tree Search for the JVM*, a recent preprint he authored with Jun Tao Luo (MS studen
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