Boston Computation Club

Shriram Krishnamurthi is a professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he researches (among other things) programming languages, software engineering, formal methods, HCI, security, and networking.  Today Shriram joined us to discuss his joint project with Kathi Fisler, Benjamin S. Lerner, and Joe Gibbs Politz, titled " A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing ".  The projec...

Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and the author of Games: Agency as Art. Today he joined us to discuss his book, which covers the philosophy of all sorts of games: rock climbing, Dark Souls, judo, poker, dungeons and dragons, etc. The event took the form of an interview hosted by Wei Sun, a longtime group member who read Thi's book in detail and...

Elizabeth Coppock is a linguistics professor at BU. He research focuses on foundational topics in truth, reference, quantification, and measurement in natural language semantics, through the lens of specific empirical puzzles. Recently, one of our group members ( Cheng Zhang ) expressed interest in Elizabeth's work as it might relate to his own research in programming languages, so we reached...

Matthias is a world-class scientist and highly influential computer programmer, and also the author of "How to Design Programs", a Computer Science 101 book which takes a fundamentally different approach than prior works. Today Matthias joined us to share his experience writing that book (and its many iterations), as well as his broader philosophy on how to instruct the next generation o...

eta is a phenomenally talented polymath, hacker, and computer programmer from the UK.  Today eta joined us to discuss her very fun project reverse engineering UK rail tickets.  This was a fun event with a reasonably big audience and lots of Q&A, and we really enjoyed it!  It was also a good example of the best possible outcome in hacking: you break something, you tell the people...

Molly White is a Northeastern alum, a software engineer, and now, a web3 researcher (researching all the stuff that stinks about web3, to be clear).  Today Molly joined us to talk about her ongoing project and perhaps magnum opus, Web3 is Going Just Great (web3isgoingjustgreat.com), an ongoing history of all the grifts, thefts, hacks, and crashes in Web3/the broader blockchain ecosystem. &nbs...

Anthony Bonato is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Toronto Metropolitan University. Anthony's research focuses on graph theory, with applications to real-world complex networks and pursuit-evasion games on graphs such as Cops and Robbers. However, today Anthony joined us not to present some groovy new results in graph theory, but rather, to discuss how one _might_ give such a presen...

Mel Andrews is an instructor and doctoral student in the department of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati.  Their work focuses on the phenomena of cognition and life, comparing and contrasting the merits and explanatory scope of conceptual and formal models of life and mind, and exploring the implications of these considerations for science at large.  Today Mel joined us to talk...

John Viega is the Executive Vice President of Products, Strategy, & Engineering at SilverSky , an Adjunct Professor at NYU Poly, former editor-in-chief for IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine , co-developer of GCM (a mode of operation for block ciphers such as AES), and the original author of Mailman , the GNU Mailing List Manager.  He's also the founder of CrashOverride, a stealthy new se...

Annie Rauwerda is an internet personality and polymath with a background in neuroscience and data science.  She is also the host and operator of Depths of Wikipedia, a phenomenally popular meme page, Depths of Wikipedia, which you can read about HERE on Wikipedia.  Annie is also herself a frequent Wikipedia editor and author.  Today she joined us to talk about how Wikipedia can be c...

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 ha...

William Kretschmer is a PhD student at the University of Texas Austin, advised by Scott Aaronson.  He's one of these pseudo-celebrity-grad-students with lots of cool splashy results and we're stoked that he took the time to talk to us today.  The talk primarily covered the basics of quantum cryptography, much of which should be familiar to regular group members who attended our quantum c...

John Ryter is my lead partner in Cambridge MA, a gnarly climber, and also a PhD student in materials science at MIT (aka MassTech) where he studies recycling using a unique combination of economic theory and environmental modeling.  John's work has entertained me during countless climbing sessions and now it can equally enthrall you, via the magic of the Internet.  We were very happy to...

Kimberly Ayers is an assistant professor of mathematics at Cal State San Marcos, where she studies the mathematics of hybrid systems.  Kimberly is a genuine theorist (in contrast to us computer science neanderthals, haha) and this talk touched on some of the aspects of hybrid systems that make them theoretically interesting (e.g.,  how the topology imposed on a skew flow can apparently b...

Roughly four years ago, when I took second semester Abstract Algebra at the University of Arizona, my professor ( Jay Taylor ) generously offered to meet with me every week outside class to discuss algebraic topics in computer science.  We chose Dr. Pin's book, Varieties of Formal Languages .  Due to my own mathematical immaturity we worked through the material slowly, and didn't finish...

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 de...

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...

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 thin...

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....

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 Prac...

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....

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...

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 indistinguishab...

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.  Apparentl...

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 en...