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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

00:59:55

Infecting Generative AI with Viruses - David A....

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/09/15

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!

en

00:57:28

08/15/25: An LLM Agent for Functional Bug Detection...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/08/15

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

en

01:13:34

08/01/25: Formal Reasoning Meets LLMs: Toward AI for...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/08/02

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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00:52:00

07/25/25: RefinedC: Automating the Foundational...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/07/25

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

en

01:41:08

06/20/25: TypeScript Types Can Run DOOM with Dimitri...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/06/22

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.

en

00:59:04

06/13/25: Gradual Verification with Jenna DiVincenzo

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/06/14

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

en

00:39:43

05/07/25: Exploring Zero-Shot Prompting for...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/05/08

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.

en

01:00:07

04/18/25: Descriptive Complexity with Ramit Das

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/04/19

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

en

00:52:44

03/21/24: How and Why to extend First Order Logic for...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/04/05

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

en

00:58:33

04/04/25: Constrained Decoding for Code Language...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/04/05

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 really appreciate that Daniel took the time to talk to us and hope you like the talk as much as we

en

01:02:10

03/08/25: An Introduction to LiquidHaskell with...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/03/08

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, with SMT-based proofs, into Haskell. This was a really compelling talk and we hope you enjoy it as much

en

00:58:11

01/10/25: Combining Causal Inference and Knowledge...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/01/10

Today Brook Santangelo and John Sterrett

en

01:00:37

01/04/25: Hacking GenAI with LLM Red Teaming and...

Boston Computation Club ·

2025/01/10

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!

en

00:45:07

11/30/24: LB4TL: A Smooth Semantics for Temporal...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/12/01

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 reinforcement learning, and a technique for verification thereof based on the over-approximation of reachable

en

00:57:23

11/17/24: When Static Analysis Meets Large Language...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/11/18

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 interesting and highly informed by prior works in the static analysis space, but leverages LLMs as a kind of

en

00:50:37

10/05/24: Abuse-Resistant Location Tracking:...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/10/06

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 problem of AirTag stalking, and how it can be ameliorated, while retaining acceptable performance, through

en

00:54:33

09/28/24: Hacking an LLM Using the Z3 Theorem Prover...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/09/28

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 tree of thought, o1, and more. Thanks again for joining us Ian!

en

00:57:07

09/07/24: Shaken, not Stirred -- Automated Discovery...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/09/07

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 afterword touching on some subtler points around the Dolev-Yao threat model, the limitations of ProVerif,

en

01:01:08

08/25/24: An Introduction to Lurk with Matej Panciak

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/08/25

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 imagine this being applicable to building something like a dweb version of AWS ... in some theoretical

en

00:52:14

08/17/24: Efficient Synthesis of Symbolic Distributed...

Boston Computation Club ·

2024/08/17

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 interesting talk with a technical conversation afterword. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

en

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