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PODCAST

Boston Computation Club

The Boston Computation Club is a small seminar group focused on mathematical computer science, and computational mathematics. Its name is plagiarized from the London Computation Club. Boston Computation Club meetings occur roughly every other week, on weekends, around 5pm EDT (modulo speaker availability). The usual format is a 20m presentation followed by 40m of discussion. Some, but not all, meetings are posted on YouTube and in podcast form.

science mathematics

All Episodes

00:57:42

08/10/24: Radically Better Academic Search With...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/08/10

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 out Undermind at www.undermind.ai , or peruse the query I did during the Q&A section here:

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01:16:03

07/27/24: Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Evan Pu

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/07/27

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 first for the Boston Computation Club. Anyway, this was a really fun talk with excellent Q&A and we

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00:53:19

07/06/24: The Algebraic Structure of Infinite Craft...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/07/06

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 presentation, which was super interesting and a lot of fun to watch.Check out Arthur's original blog

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00:40:01

06/22/24: npm install everything with Evan Boehs

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/06/22

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 of adults got made at him, when really, they should have been mad at themselves for building a bad

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00:53:08

06/08/24: Compressing a JSON Parser Beyond...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/06/09

June Marcuse

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00:58:23

04/20/24: Chess-GPT's Internal World Model with Adam...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/04/20

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 an actual board state, and learns to make legal moves. The discussion on this one was great and we

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00:59:04

04/12/24: DY Fuzzing: Formal Dolev-Yao Models Meet...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/04/12

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 engaged audience (with representation from Galois, TwoSix, and academia!).

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02:05:43

04/23/24: Pegasus Panel

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/03/26

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 rights activist at the Jordan Open Source Association as well as the Digital Arabia Network. - Elina

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00:59:31

03/08/24: Bitwuzla with Mathias Preiner

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/03/09

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 technical questions!

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00:45:34

01/13/24: How to Fund your Projects by Remembering...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/01/14

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/

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01:04:37

12/15/23: Q&A on Puzzles, with Roger Barkan in...

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/12/15

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 event sometime in the future! Jacob's interactive:

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01:04:20

11/19/23: Semi Open-Source Robotics with Jan Hennecke

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/11/20

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 with a lot of audience engagement and I think many of you will find it interesting!

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00:57:33

11/04/23: Logic in Color with Christian Williams

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/11/04

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 arrows in monoidal string diagrams. But from this key observation comes the more foundational view

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01:12:11

10/21/23: How to Write a Coequation, with Todd Schmid

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/10/21

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 (categorical) subject relating to the how we add algebraic structure to a space, how we think about

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01:14:48

10/07/23: Artificial Intelligence, Openness, and...

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/10/07

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 example, in the New York Times. David Widder is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life

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01:04:34

09/17/23: Open Problems in Probabilistic Programming...

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/09/17

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 of building useful probabilistic programming languages. Today Eli joined us to discuss that research,

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01:05:25

09/09/23: Transferable and Fixable Proofs with Bill...

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/09/09

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 fascinating conversation that ensued. We also discussed what it's like to work in an interactive theorem

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00:43:22

09/01/23: ChipSec with Nathaniel Mitchell and Dan Scott

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/09/01

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 (although as we discuss, getting it to work on Windows requires some leg-work). This was a really interesting

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01:01:18

08/12/23: Packing Chromatic with Bernardo Anibal...

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/08/13

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 mathematics and SAT solving. Bernardo and his advisor recently solved an open problem in the space, finding

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00:42:30

07/15/23: Symmetries, Flat Minima, and the Conserved...

Boston Computation Club ·

2023/07/15

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, as well as co-authors Robin Walters, Rose Yu, and Nima Dehmamy. This is a really interesting paper

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