Boston Computation Club

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 be quite strange).  Since I've only previously seen hybrid systems work in CS, where it's always motivated by practical justifications like "Boeing", this was refreshing and cool!  Anyway we had a really nice time with a great conversation section, and if you missed it, I'm sure you'll thoroughly enjoy the recording.  You can read more about Kimberly HERE.

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 the text before I graduated.  Nevertheless, working through this material helped inspire me to pursue a PhD in formal methods - an endeavor I'm solidly halfway through at the time of writing.  All this is to say, Jean-Eric Pin is partially to blame for the fact that I am currently a sleepless PhD student at Northeastern University.  

Today Jean-Eric Pin joined us to discuss The Generalized Star Height Problem, an open problem in formal language theory which he and his colleagues have attempted to attack from all angles: algebraically, logically, topologically, etc.  It's one of those deeply enticing problems in math that's reasonably easy to explain yet apparently quite challenging to solve.  In this 2-hour talk, Jean-Eric Pin explains the problem starting with the most basic definitions, and then discusses some of the related results from those who wish to solve it.  It's a fascinating and very accessible talk, and we really hope you enjoy!

You can view a video version of the talk HERE.

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 definitions, such as "monoid" and "completion of a metric space".  To which end, I prepared a presentation, went through some light-weight peer review with random friends from the PL group at Northeastern, and then delivered this talk.  This is a fun little review on various useful topics in math, and also, a good refresher if you intend to attend Dr. Pin's talk.  I hope you enjoy!

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 partitions: those who are more impressed by Andrea's PhD, and those who are more impressed by his membership in Shellphish 😉).  Today, Andrea joined us to discuss some of his security research into ROP attacks, specifically attacks that exploit timing-based side-channels caused by speculative execution.  This research builds on the academic legacy of attacks like Spectre, but formalizes the relevant threat models and explores the full space of relevant attack varieties.  The talk was fun, technical, and exciting.  We concluded with a question-and-answer/discussion section, mostly centered on (a) attack realizability against differing architectures, and (b) mitigations/defenses.  This was a great talk, and we hope you enjoy it post-hoc!

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 things decentralized.  The discussion was lively, touching on sybil attacks, democracy, in-real-world legal and financial instruments, blockchain permanence, forking, and other issues!  We really enjoyed this open conversation and look forward to more events like it in the future.

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.  And then entering text.  And then actually utilizing the feedback offered by the game to start interactively solving the puzzle.  We concluded with a brief conversation about the complexity of handling the clues in the context of words that have more than one of a given letter.

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 Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science, and co-founder of the UK Open Rights Group.  In short: Cory is precisely the kind of polymath we love to engage with at the Boston Computation Club!  Today, Cory joined us to discuss Big Tech - what's wrong with it and how to fix (read: DISMANTLE) it.  The talk was engaging, exciting, elucidating - all that and a bag of chips.  We really enjoyed talking to Cory and we hope you enjoy the recording!  You can also view this talk in video form HERE.

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.  This talk was a lot of fun, and the math was refreshingly easy to follow, despite the difficult topic.  The Q&A section was also quite good, although some of it was cut from the recording (hence why you should always come to events live!).  

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 most creative hacks we saw in 2021 and we were thrilled to have Nicholas tell us about it.  The presentation was great, as was the discussion, where we got into the difficulties of the disclosure process, the complexities of peer review (in tandem with ethical vulnerability disclosure), and future problems (🤖🔔🐍🧶are emojis kosher??).  We hope you enjoy!

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 indistinguishable from r/dankmemes?  If not, prepare to get caught by the local sysadmin.