Boston Computation Club

Sum-check protocol: categorical view, Alex Sorokin

Alex is a friend of mine and a mathematician.  He did his PhD in mathematics with other Alex (Martsinkovsky), who has presented at the seminar group previously.  We're hu

P-stability for 3-uniform Hypergraphs, Daniel Yu

Today Daniel Yu gave a pure math talk on an extension he performed independently of work he had conducted during his math semester abroad in Budapest.

Understanding patterns of adoption and adaptation of open models on local systems, Woohyeuk (Kevin) Lee

Today Woohyeuk (Kevin) Lee joined us to discuss local AI (and the question of just how local it really is). This is exciting work at the intersection of computer science

Cellular automata and artificial life in the deep learning era, Casey Martin

Casey Martin is a dirtbag intellectual, local savant, and recent PhD in the Boulder metro area. He's a party favorite and today he joined us to discuss cellular automata

06/26/26: Tracing Introspection Across Model Depth, Zach Maas

Zach Maas is an independent AI safety & mechanistic interpretability researcher in Boulder, Colorado, funded by Coefficient Giving. Today Zach joined us to talk about som

An Extremely Short Proof of the Hairy Ball Theorem with Peter McGrath

Today Peter McGrath An Extremely Short Proof of the Hairy Ball Theorem. Peter is a professor of mathematics at NC State, where he researches geometric analysis, minimal s

Logic.py: Bridging the Gap between LLMs and Constraint Solvers with Pascal Kesseli

Pascal Kesseli is a software engineer and technical lead at Microsoft AI, with a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford (or a DPhil? Or whatever they call PhDs on that side

2/17/26: Approximately Aligned Decoding with Daniel Melcer

Daniel Melcer is a PhD student at Northeastern University, where he researches formal methods, reinforcement learning, and large language models, among other things. Dani

02/06/26: Early experiments in FMxAI at Galois with Max von Hippel

Max von Hippel is ... me, the organizer and founder of the Boston Computation Club. Today I hosted an extremely informal event to chat about some of the early experiments

VeriExploit: Automatic Bug Reproduction in Smart Contracts via LLMs and Formal Methods, Chenfeng Wei

Chenfeng Wei is a PhD student at the University of Manchester, where he researches formal guarantees for large language models. Today he joined us to talk about his lates

Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths - Xiao Mao

Today Xiao Mao joined us to discuss his groundbreaking work, Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths. It's not every day you beat Djikstra

Infecting Generative AI with Viruses - David A. Noever and Forrest McKee

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

08/15/25: An LLM Agent for Functional Bug Detection in Network Protocols with Mingwei Zheng

Mingwei Zheng a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, advised by Prof. Xiangyu Zhang since 2021. Before that, she received her Bache

08/01/25: Formal Reasoning Meets LLMs: Toward AI for Mathematics and Verification with Kaiyu Yang

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

07/25/25: RefinedC: Automating the Foundational Verification of C Code with Refined Ownership Types with Michael Sammler

Michael Sammler n assistant professor leading the Programming Languages and Verification Group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Today he joined

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

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 pr

06/13/25: Gradual Verification with Jenna DiVincenzo

Jenna DiVincenzo is an Assistant Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering @ Purdue University. She is broadly interested in research s

05/07/25: Exploring Zero-Shot Prompting for Generating Data Format Descriptions, Prashant Anantharaman

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 hi

04/18/25: Descriptive Complexity with Ramit Das

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, excha

03/21/24: How and Why to extend First Order Logic for Knowledge-Based Systems with Marc Denecker

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 Ma