Boston Computation Club

Епізоди

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  Sum-check protocol: categorical view, Alex Sorokin 08.09.2026 46хв

  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!
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  P-stability for 3-uniform Hypergraphs, Daniel Yu 08.09.2026 1год 4хв

  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.
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  Understanding patterns of adoption and adaptation of open models on local systems, Woohyeuk (Kevin) Lee 08.09.2026 35хв

  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.
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  Cellular automata and artificial life in the deep learning era, Casey Martin 08.09.2026 1год 9хв

  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!
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  06/26/26: Tracing Introspection Across Model Depth, Zach Maas 03.07.2026 48хв

  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!
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  An Extremely Short Proof of the Hairy Ball Theorem with Peter McGrath 18.04.2026 58хв

  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 as a group, doing pure math on an iPad and loving it! We hope you enjoy the talk as much as we did!
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  Logic.py: Bridging the Gap between LLMs and Constraint Solvers with Pascal Kesseli 09.03.2026 57хв

  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 directions building on said work.
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  2/17/26: Approximately Aligned Decoding with Daniel Melcer 18.02.2026 48хв

  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 vision of where constrained inference problems are heading in the future.
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  02/06/26: Early experiments in FMxAI at Galois with Max von Hippel 07.02.2026 54хв

  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.
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  VeriExploit: Automatic Bug Reproduction in Smart Contracts via LLMs and Formal Methods, Chenfeng Wei 17.01.2026 41хв

  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 did!
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  Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths - Xiao Mao 05.01.2026 57хв

  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!
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  Infecting Generative AI with Viruses - David A. Noever and Forrest McKee 15.09.2025 59хв

  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 discussions we've hosted in a while. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
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  08/15/25: An LLM Agent for Functional Bug Detection in Network Protocols with Mingwei Zheng 15.08.2025 57хв

  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 agents that combine program analysis with LLMs for deep codebase understanding that improve software correctness, robustness, and trustworthiness. Today Mingwei joined us to discuss some ongoing work which she previously presented at IEEE Security and Privacy LangSec, applying language models to bug detection in protocols with IETF RFCs. This was a great talk with deep, technical content and a good conversation. We hope you enjoy!
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  08/01/25: Formal Reasoning Meets LLMs: Toward AI for Mathematics and Verification with Kaiyu Yang 02.08.2025 1год 13хв

  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 and we hope you enjoy the talk as much as we did!
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  07/25/25: RefinedC: Automating the Foundational Verification of C Code with Refined Ownership Types with Michael Sammler 25.07.2025 52хв

  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 architectures, and DimSum, which provides a decentralized approach for reasoning about multi-language programs (with a particular focus on RefinedC). We had a small but really dedicated crowd which facilitated an excellent discussion. This was a really fun one and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
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  06/20/25: TypeScript Types Can Run DOOM with Dimitri Mitropoulos 22.06.2025 1год 41хв

  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.
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  06/13/25: Gradual Verification with Jenna DiVincenzo 14.06.2025 59хв

  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 her broad research program in gradual verification. This was a really interesting talk with great Q&A and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
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  05/07/25: Exploring Zero-Shot Prompting for Generating Data Format Descriptions, Prashant Anantharaman 08.05.2025 39хв

  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.
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  04/18/25: Descriptive Complexity with Ramit Das 19.04.2025 1год

  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 wet with complexity theory, some language theory, and even a smidgeon of model theory and underpinnings of abstract interpretation. It was really fun and we can't wait to host another talk by Ramit sometime in the future!
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  03/21/24: How and Why to extend First Order Logic for Knowledge-Based Systems with Marc Denecker 05.04.2025 52хв

  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 industrial use-cases thereof, potentially with profound implications for the future and realizability of so-called AGI.