Boston Computation Club

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 studen...

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...

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 contr...

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, dynam...

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 ad...

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 netw...

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...

"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. &nbs...

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...

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...