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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

00:54:28

05/07/22: Math Café #3: Prep for Dr. Pin's Talk with...

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/05/07

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 definitions, such as "monoid" and "completion of a metric space". To which end, I prepared a presentation, went through

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00:55:54

04/15/22: When Memory Guards are Crooked and Become...

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/04/15

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 partitions: those who are more impressed by Andrea's PhD, and those who are more impressed by his membership in Shellphish

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01:01:59

03/20/22: An Open Conversation on Web3 with the SpiceDAO

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/03/20

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

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01:03:52

03/12/22: Live Coding: Making a Wordle Scraper and...

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/03/12

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

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01:14:42

03/05/22: Seize the Means of Computation: the Big...

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/03/06

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 Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science, and co-founder of the UK

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01:04:22

02/17/22: Quantum Computing in Plato's Cave with...

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/02/17

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

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01:04:49

02/06/22: Trojan Source Attacks with Nicholas Boucher

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/02/07

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 most creative hacks we saw in 2021 and we were thrilled to have Nicholas tell us about it. The presentation was great,

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01:22:41

01/08/22: Covert C2 Channels with Kai Bernardini

Boston Computation Club ·

2022/01/09

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. Kai on Github Kai on Twitter This talk on

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00:58:51

12/04/21: Feynman Integrals for a Mathematical...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/12/04

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

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01:14:48

12/03/21: Aesthetic and Organic Complexity with Tyler...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/12/04

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

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01:06:16

10/24/21: An Extensible and Modular Design and...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/10/24

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

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00:45:40

10/15/21: Mathematical Programming Modulo Strings...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/10/15

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

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01:07:18

10/09/21: Types in PL Research vs Types in Julia with...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/10/10

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

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01:16:38

09/12/21: More Category Theory for More Cybernetics...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/09/12

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

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01:01:49

08/28/21: Compilation Techniques for Reconfigurable...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/08/28

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 :) Sara Archour's homepage can be found HERE. This presentation can also be viewed in

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00:58:42

07/30/21: Structural Attacks on Local Routing in...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/07/30

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

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01:17:43

07/24/21: Linear Haskell with Artem Pelenitsyn

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/07/24

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

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01:02:54

07/10/21: The Illogical Nature of Chemical...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/07/10

"Café Events" are small, informal events where we discuss our research and our (perhaps, unfulfilled) research interests. Our ongoing "Biology Café" series is exactly that, but focused on topics at the intersection of biology and computation. Today's presentation by Sophia von Hippel covered the open, and very important, problem of developing a mathematical language for chemistry. Chemistry has a great diagrammatic syntax, but a (or, multiple) terrible prose representation. Sophia presents the

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00:55:55

06/13/21: Modeling Content and Context with Deep...

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/06/13

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." [ Paper ] [ Maria ][ Code ][ Video ][ Boston Computation Club ]

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01:04:54

05/29/21: Homotopy Type Theory 101 with Carlo Angiuli

Boston Computation Club ·

2021/06/09

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,

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80 results

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