Boston Computation Club

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 who made the thing, and they give you a high-five and fix it.  Thank you so much eta for speaking to us!  To learn more about eta's work, refer to her website here: https://eta.st/

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.  This was a fun one - perhaps even a controversial one - and we hope you enjoy it!

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 presentation, with panache! This was a super fun event with a lively and engaged discussion and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

- Anthony's webpage: https://math.ryerson.ca/~abonato/

- Anthony's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Anthony_Bonato

- This talk in video form: https://youtu.be/ZmLoQDWEZgg

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 about the philosophy of math in science and mathematical models in scientific reasoning.  How do models relate to the real world?  When can models tell us something about ... anything other than their own mathematical substance?  And perhaps most importantly, in the Q&A section, how can we build a formal mathematics for computer hacking 😉?  This was a super fun event and we are very thankful for Mel's time.  We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

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 security company which you should totally apply to work at!  Today he joined us to do an impromptu Q&A about his storied career as one of the people on the ground floor of cybersecurity, in its messy and exciting start.  This was a fun one and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

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 charming, funny, and informative, all at once.  She showed us a variety of charming examples of Wikipedia in all its niche internet glory, and then answered a metric ton of questions about Wikipedia, the internet, Stack Exchange, etc.  This was a super fun event and one we really enjoyed.  We hope you enjoy it too!

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 has a paper in Crypto!), and today she joined the Boston Computation Club to share some of that hard-earned wisdom.  LakYah's talk focused on the difficult problem of efficiently hashing data such that the hashes preserve a binary predicate relationship from the pre-image, specifically a relationship relating to the distance between the two compared objects.  This is a fascinating topic with implications for systems like Apple's facial recognition and attempts at privacy-preserving CSAM detection.  We're super stoked LakYah agreed to speak to us today and we hope you enjoy her talk as much as we did! 

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 cafe series with Billy, but also concluded with some groovy quantum crypto history (see: quantum cash) and a discussion of exciting recent results by William & co.  This is one of a series of cryptography related talks we're hosting this semester, and William started that series out with a bang!  We hope you enjoy!

Cristiano Teixeira is a friend of the Club, and the CEO of Lindy Labs.  He has a traditional mathematics background and is one of the grown-ups in the crypto/DeFi space.  Today he joined us to give an insider's perspective on the recent crypto crash(es), stable coins, ponzy schemes, DeFi, and more.  This was an extremely interesting event with a great Q&A section and a big audience.  We had a lot of fun and we're certain you'll enjoy it as well.

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 have John present to the group, particularly since the audience contained a chemist, a physicist, and a geo-physicist, in addition to the standard array of derelict computer scientists (myself included).  To read more about John's work, refer here.  You can also watch this talk on YouTube, here.