Boston Computation Club

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 has a paper in Crypto!), and today she joined the Boston Computation Club to share some of that hard-earned wisdom.  LakYah's talk focused on the difficult problem of efficiently hashing data such that the hashes preserve a binary predicate relationship from the pre-image, specifically a relationship relating to the distance between the two compared objects.  This is a fascinating topic with implications for systems like Apple's facial recognition and attempts at privacy-preserving CSAM detection.  We're super stoked LakYah agreed to speak to us today and we hope you enjoy her talk as much as we did! 

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 things decentralized.  The discussion was lively, touching on sybil attacks, democracy, in-real-world legal and financial instruments, blockchain permanence, forking, and other issues!  We really enjoyed this open conversation and look forward to more events like it in the future.

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.  And then entering text.  And then actually utilizing the feedback offered by the game to start interactively solving the puzzle.  We concluded with a brief conversation about the complexity of handling the clues in the context of words that have more than one of a given letter.

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.  This talk was a lot of fun, and the math was refreshingly easy to follow, despite the difficult topic.  The Q&A section was also quite good, although some of it was cut from the recording (hence why you should always come to events live!).  

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 indistinguishable from r/dankmemes?  If not, prepare to get caught by the local sysadmin. 

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.  Apparently "Feynman integral" means different things to different people; the kind discussed here are those associated with "Feynman diagrams".  The talk was engaging and fun, and at the end Matt fielded mathematical questions from the audience, which included both usual BCC members and some NEU mathematics faculty.  This was a fun one and I encourage you to watch it, if you didn't make the live event! 

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 environmental studies at Wellesley College and now works at Reed Hilderbrand, and Joe studied bioengineering at MIT and now works at Ginko Bioworks.  The conversation was wide-ranging and compelling, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!  

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 student in CS at Carnegie Mellon; also in attendance at this talk).  The paper is exactly what it sounds like, and the presentation was a lot of fun, with clear mathematical background, a solid foundation in software engineering principles, and some impressive code demos.    

Ankit Kumar is a PhD student in the Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University, advised by Pete Manolios.  He is from Dhanbad, Jharkand, in India, and prior to joining Northeastern, he earned his MTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur and his BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi.  Now, Ankit's research focuses on formal methods (FM) -- particularly in ACL2Sedan -- and the use of FM to study programming languages, including writing machine-checkable proofs to prove properties.  Today Ankit joined us to present Mathematical Programming Modulo Strings, his recent FMCAD21 paper.  This presentation can be viewed as an "extended" version of the 10-minute presentation he gave at that conference.  

Julia Belyakova is a PhD student in computer science at Northeastern University, where she is currently focused on formalizing the Julia programming language.  Julia's primary primary research interests are programming languages and type theory, although she also enjoys theorem proving, generic programming, functional and object-oriented programming, software engineering, programming by contracts, software testing, and as of late, human aspects of software engineering and the interaction between humans and programming languages.  In short: Julia is quite the polymath.  Today she joined us to discuss the Julia Language's type system, in contrast to type systems in other languages, and in programming language research papers.  This was a really fun talk and also a very accessible entry-point to the topic for those without a strong PL background.  We hope you enjoy!  

Matteo Capucci is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde in the MSP group, advised by Neil Ghani and Scott Cunningham.  He studies Applied Category Theory (aka ACT), specifically Categorical Cybernetics and Applied Topos Theory.  Today Matteo joined us to discuss the foundations of Categorical Cybernetics, in a wide-ranging conversation touching on lenses, feedback systems, dynamical systems, and more.  The conversation extended these ideas to distributed systems, model checking, cyber-physical systems, program sketching, and quantum systems, among other things.  This one was an absolute blast live and we hope you enjoy it after the fact in its audio form.  

Sara Archour recently completed a PhD at MIT/CSAIL in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, and is joining Stanford University (EE) as an Associate Professor. Sara studies analog computers - how to build them; how to use them; what they're good for; how to stick them together to do interesting things; and so forth. Today, Sara joined us to discuss these things, with a smidgeon of career advice at the end :)

Ben Weintraub is a PhD student in computer science at Northeastern University, advised by Cristina Nita-Rotaru.  Today he joined us to present his paper *Structural Attacks on Local Routing in Payment Channel Networks*, which was accepted to the 2021 Euro S&P Blockchain workshop.  This is a fascinating paper studying a startlingly powerful attack strategy against payment channel networks.  We really enjoyed Ben's presentation and the subsequent discussion, which involved PhD students in computer science and economics, in addition to professional engineers and mathematicians.  You can learn more about Ben and his work here: https://ben-weintraub.com/

Artem is a PhD student in computer science at Northeastern University, advised by Professor Jan Vitek.  Prior to joining the Khoury PhD program, Artem worked as an Assistant Professor at Southern Federal University in Russia, where he earned his MSc and BSc.  Today Artem joined us to present about linear Haskell, a version of / feature-set for Haskell allowing "linear" types.  Artem explained linearity, why it might be useful, and why adding linear types to an existing (non-linear) language can be difficult - with Haskell as a case study.

Maria is a PhD student in Computer Science at Purdue University, where she works with Dr. Dan Goldwasser on neural-symbolic methods to model natural language discourse, among other things.  Today she presented her recent project DRaiL, "an open-source declarative framework for specifying deep relational models, designed to support a variety of NLP scenarios."  

Carlo is a postdoc in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a Ph.D. under Robert Harper. He previously studied at Indiana University Bloomington, where he received a B.S. in Mathematics and in Computer Science.  Today Carlo joined us to discuss Homotopy Type Theory, a new foundations for mathematics based on a recently-discovered connection between Homotopy Theory and Type Theory.  Carlo explains intuitively what Homotopy Type Theory is and how it is used, and then goes over various possible implementations of Homotopy Type Theory in a theorem-proving environment such as Coq.  Finally, he fields questions on Homotopy Type Theory, theorem-proving, and other topics from the Boston Computation Club audience.