Boston Computation Club

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.  Apparently "Feynman integral" means different things to different people; the kind discussed here are those associated with "Feynman diagrams".  The talk was engaging and fun, and at the end Matt fielded mathematical questions from the audience, which included both usual BCC members and some NEU mathematics faculty.  This was a fun one and I encourage you to watch it, if you didn't make the live event! 

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 environmental studies at Wellesley College and now works at Reed Hilderbrand, and Joe studied bioengineering at MIT and now works at Ginko Bioworks.  The conversation was wide-ranging and compelling, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!  

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 student in CS at Carnegie Mellon; also in attendance at this talk).  The paper is exactly what it sounds like, and the presentation was a lot of fun, with clear mathematical background, a solid foundation in software engineering principles, and some impressive code demos.    

- Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.10061 

- Larkin: https://larkz.github.io/ 

- Jun: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jun-tao-luo

- Video: https://youtu.be/bVpUlJU-piA

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) -- particularly in ACL2Sedan -- and the use of FM to study programming languages, including writing machine-checkable proofs to prove properties.  Today Ankit joined us to present Mathematical Programming Modulo Strings, his recent FMCAD21 paper.  This presentation can be viewed as an "extended" version of the 10-minute presentation he gave at that conference.  

- Ankit Kumar: https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/people/ankit-kumar/

- FMCAD21: https://fmcad.org/FMCAD21/

- Pete Manolios: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/~pete/

- The Boston Computation Club: https://bstn.cc/

- Video form of this talk: https://youtu.be/doeauZv3JrE

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 contracts, software testing, and as of late, human aspects of software engineering and the interaction between humans and programming languages.  In short: Julia is quite the polymath.  Today she joined us to discuss the Julia Language's type system, in contrast to type systems in other languages, and in programming language research papers.  This was a really fun talk and also a very accessible entry-point to the topic for those without a strong PL background.  We hope you enjoy!  

- Julia Belyakova's homepage: https://julbinb.github.io/

- The Julia language: https://julialang.org/

- The Boston Computation Club: https://bstn.cc/

- This talk but as a video: https://youtu.be/JNxrX2XvZIY

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, dynamical systems, and more.  The conversation extended these ideas to distributed systems, model checking, cyber-physical systems, program sketching, and quantum systems, among other things.  This one was an absolute blast live and we hope you enjoy it after the fact in its audio form.  

You can read more about Matteo HERE. 

You can read more about the Boston Computation Club HERE.

You can watch this presentation in video form on YouTube HERE.

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 advice at the end :)

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 networks.  We really enjoyed Ben's presentation and the subsequent discussion, which involved PhD students in computer science and economics, in addition to professional engineers and mathematicians.  You can learn more about Ben and his work here: https://ben-weintraub.com/

This talk is also available on YouTube HERE.

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 explained linearity, why it might be useful, and why adding linear types to an existing (non-linear) language can be difficult - with Haskell as a case study.

"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.  Chemistry has a great diagrammatic syntax, but a (or, multiple) terrible prose representation.  Sophia presents the problem in clear and careful detail with examples, and then we discuss.  TL;DR: we don't solve the problem.  Sophia is currently pursuing a BS in Chemistry at the University of Arizona (with Honors).  She previously interned with NASA and served as a COVID-19 vaccinator.  She is also an Emergency Medical Technician with the University of Arizona Emergency Medical Services (UAEMS).  You can also view this presentation as a video on YouTube [HERE].