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Boston Computation Club

by Max von Hippel

The Boston Computation Club is a small seminar group focused on mathematical computer science, and computational mathematics. Its name is plagiarized from the London Computation Club. Boston Computation Club meetings occur roughly every other week, on weekends, around 5pm EDT (modulo speaker availability). The usual format is a 20m presentation followed by 40m of discussion. Some, but not all, meetings are posted on YouTube and in podcast form.

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Episodes

  1. 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 huge fans of both Alexes at the Boston Computation Club and we hope you enjoy this talk as much as we did!

  2. 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.

  3. 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 and social science! Enjoy.

  4. 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 and their generalizations. Enjoy!

  5. 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 some of his recent work tracing introspection across model depth. This is, I think, the first mech interp talk we've hosted other...

  6. 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 surfaces, PDEs. Today's talk was an elegant presentation of the classical result -- Peter makes it accessible, and explains each...

  7. 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 of the pond). Today Pascal joined us to discuss work he completed while at META FAIR, focused on the conjoining of large…

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  8. 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. Daniel also has the most colorful hair in the business (bright red for this talk, other colors for other occasions). Today he…

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  9. 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 in FMxAI I was involved with at Galois, two years ago.

  10. 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 latest work exploring bugs in smart-contracts. This is a really interesting project at the intersection of explainable AI, smart...

  11. 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 at something. This was a good one. Thank you for talking to us, Xiao!

  12. 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 present their joint work Infecting Generative AI with Viruses. This was a really great presentation that took a rigorous…

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  13. 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 Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Technology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2020. Mingwei's research...

  14. 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 exciting field in which reinforcement learning and theorem proving combine to provide a new frontier for fully automated...

  15. 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 us to talk about his three primary projects: RefinedC, which uses a refinement and ownership type system to verify C code,...

  16. 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 project to get DOOM running completely within Typescript's type system. Someone give the dude a PhD, please.

  17. 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 spanning software verification, programming languages, and software engineering, especially research aimed at making…

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  18. 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 his work with NARF, to appear at IEEE S&P, on generating grammars for fuzzing using LLMs. This is a super exciting new frontier…

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  19. 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, exchanging papers, etc. and today he finally agreed to come give a talk to the group about his area of expertise -- descriptive...

  20. 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 Marc's student Simon Vandevelde is set to give on IDP-Z3, a formal reasoning machine that Marc and Simon have built. This was a...

  21. 04/04/25: Constrained Decoding for Code Language Models via Efficient Left and Right Quotienting of Context-Sensitive Grammars with Daniel Melcer

    Today Daniel Melcer joined us to present Constrained Decoding for Code Language Models via Efficient Left and Right Quotienting of Context-Sensitive Grammars (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.17988). This is work he completed while at Amazon, and it's a really interesting project around how to…

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  22. 03/08/25: An Introduction to LiquidHaskell with Michael H. Borkowski

    Michael H. Borkowski is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Before joining Purdue, he earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he was affiliated with the ProgSys Group. Today Michael...

  23. 01/10/25: Combining Causal Inference and Knowledge Graphs with Brook Santangelo and John Sterrett

    Today Brook Santangelo and John Sterrett

  24. 01/04/25: Hacking GenAI with LLM Red Teaming and Beyond with Gaspard Baye

    Gaspard Baye is a Cyber AI Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he researches AI-driven offensive and defensive security applications. Today Gaspard joined us to present "Hacking GenAI with LLM Red Teaming and Beyond" based on his recent DefCon talk. This was a…

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  25. 11/30/24: LB4TL: A Smooth Semantics for Temporal Logic to Train Neural Feedback Controllers with Navid Hashemi

    Navid Hashemi recently defended his PhD at USC and is about to begin a post-doc at Vanderbilt. His research focuses on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Temporal Logics, with applications in Formal Verification of Learning Enabled Systems and Neurosymbolic Reinforcement Learning....

  26. 11/17/24: When Static Analysis Meets Large Language Models with Chengpeng Wang

    Chengpeng Wang working with Prof. Xiangyu Zhang. His research focuses on program analysis, especially software analysis, and in particular how existing analysis techniques intersect with emerging approaches from AI such as Large Language Models. Today Chengpeng joined us to talk about his recent...

  27. 10/05/24: Abuse-Resistant Location Tracking: Balancing Privacy and Safety in the Offline Finding Ecosystem with Harry Eldridge

    Harry Eldridge is a Cryptography PhD student at Johns Hopkins, advised by Abhishek Jain and Matthew Green. His research (so far) touches on security and privacy implications of commodity hardware, which is a fascinating topic deserving of the mathematically disciplined, cryptographically informed...

  28. 09/28/24: Hacking an LLM Using the Z3 Theorem Prover with Ian Bicking

    Ian Bicking is an engineer at Brilliant, which is also what he is. (Sorry, dad joke). Ian joined us today to talk about his super charming (and extremely interesting) weekend of experiments hacking various LLMs to solve puzzles using z3. The presentation was roughly the first 2/3 of the event and...

  29. 09/07/24: Shaken, not Stirred -- Automated Discovery of Subtle Attacks on Protocols using Mix-Nets with Dhekra Mahmoud

    Dhekra Mahmoud at LIMOS in Clermont-Ferrand, France, where she researches the formal analysis of cryptographic protocols under the supervision of Pascal Lafoucade and Jannik Dreier. Today Dhekra joined us to present her recent USENIX paper Shaken, not Stirred -- Automated Discovery of Subtle...

  30. 08/25/24: An Introduction to Lurk with Matej Panciak

    Matej Panciak holds a PhD in mathematics and is a software engineer at the Argument Computer Corporation, where among other things, he works on Lurk. Lurk is a LISP for defining computations that can prove (in the ZKP sense) that they ran, which is probably useful for all sorts of cool things we...

  31. 08/17/24: Efficient Synthesis of Symbolic Distributed Protocols by Sketching with Derek Egolf

    Derek Egolf is a PhD student (since 2021) at Northeastern University, advised by Stavros Tripakis. His primary research focus is the automatic generation of correct-by-construction systems from high-level specifications (synthesis). Today Derek talked about his recent paper in this vein…

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  32. 08/10/24: Radically Better Academic Search With Undermind with Joshua Ramette

    Joshua Ramette (https://x.com/RametteJoshua) recently completed a PhD in physics at Mass Tech, and today he joined us to talk about his new project, Undermind. Josh and his friend Tom Hartke (https://www.tomhartke.com/) founded Undermind (YC S24) to radically improve academic literature search...

  33. 07/27/24: Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Evan Pu

    Evan Pu ( https://evanthebouncy.github.io/ , @evanthebouncy on X ) is a senior research scientist at Autodesk AI Lab, working on code-generation for human-machine collaboration in CAD, and industry scale instruction-following dataset annotation. Today Evan joined us from a toilet (with the lid...

  34. 07/06/24: The Algebraic Structure of Infinite Craft with Arthur O’Dwyer

    Arthur O’Dwyer is a C++ programmer and blogger who today joined us to talk about his musings on the algebraic structure of the popular web-game Infinite Craft. Infinite Craft is a clever little experiment in sandboxed exploration, and it turns out to give rise to a rather complex mathematical...

  35. 06/22/24: npm install everything with Evan Boehs

    Evan Boehs is a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT who broke the freaking internet. What more do I need to say? Hire this kid. Maybe I will. It's a race. Evan made an npm package called everything which installs everything. Then he got stuck in a dependency loop when someone tried to delete something. It turns...

  36. 06/08/24: Compressing a JSON Parser Beyond Comprehension with June Marcuse

    June Marcuse

  37. 04/20/24: Chess-GPT's Internal World Model with Adam Karvonen

    Adam Karvonen was my coworker at Galois and is a bright guy doing really interesting stuff in the ML interpretability space. Today he joined us to present his work on Chess-GPT, you guessed it, a GPT model that can play chess. The punchline isn't so much how good the model is as it is how the…

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  38. 04/12/24: DY Fuzzing: Formal Dolev-Yao Models Meet Cryptographic Protocol Fuzz Testing with Max Ammann

    Max Ammann is a cybersecurity researcher at Trail of Bits, where he's recently been working on extending his Master's thesis work on fuzzing cryptographic protocols into an industrial-grade fuzzing tool. That work resulted in an S&P publication which is what he joined us to present today. This…

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  39. 04/23/24: Pegasus Panel

    For this event, Holmes Wilson of Fight for the Future moderated a panel retrospective on the Pegasus malware. Our panelists were: - Jonathan Rugman: Foreign Affairs Correspondent at Channel 4 News, BAFTA Award-winning journalist, visiting lecturer at University of London, and Senior Associate...

  40. 03/08/24: Bitwuzla with Mathias Preiner

    Mathias Preiner is a Research Scientist at Stanford University in the Centaur lab. He is one of the main developers of the SMT solver Boolector (since June 2012) and Bitwuzla -- which is what he joined us to discuss today. This was a good talk, but an excellent Q&A, and we really enjoyed it.…

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  41. 01/13/24: How to Fund your Projects by Remembering One Number with Joe Shiraef

    Joe Shiraef is a professional card counter and indie game dev. Today he joined us for a very fun, free-form conversation on advantage play, indie game development, avoid arrest, and pursuing your passions. https://www.inktalestudios.com/

  42. 12/15/23: Q&A on Puzzles, with Roger Barkan in conversation with Jacob Denbeaux

    Today puzzle-maker Roger Barkan joined us to talk about the creation and solution of cave puzzles, a category of puzzle for which he's quite famous as a puzzle author. Jacob lead the conversation, using an interactive puzzle that he implemented with the help of ChatGPT (:0), and it was a ton of...

  43. 11/19/23: Semi Open-Source Robotics with Jan Hennecke

    Jan Hennecke is an engineer and roboticist in Boston, MA. Jan has been a buddy of mine for ages, ever since we met at the Bernardo Faria Jiu Jitsu Academy where he told me a hilarious story about placing top-3 in his first half ironman while munching down on snickers. Today Jan joined us to talk...

  44. 11/04/23: Logic in Color with Christian Williams

    Today Christian Williams joined us to talk about his dissertation project, Logic in Color. This is a really exciting project which he is now working on post-graduation, which aims to re-frame the way we think about logic, and logics, using a largely visual medium. The key insight is that certain...

  45. 10/21/23: How to Write a Coequation, with Todd Schmid

    Todd Schmid an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of St. Mary's College of California. They are generally intereted in the algebraic, coalgebraic, and logical foundations of program semantics, and recently completed a PhD as a part of the PPLV group in the Computer Science...

  46. 10/07/23: Artificial Intelligence, Openness, and "Existential" Risk: Well Informed Vibes on What is Hype and What is Real, with Avijit Ghosh, David Widder, and Fabio Tollon, moderated by Wei Sun

    Avijit Ghosh is a Research Data Scientist at AdeptID and a Lecturer in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He's a good friend of mine and was an element of my PhD cohort at Northeastern. He's also a well-respected researcher at the intersection of machine learning,...

  47. 09/17/23: Open Problems in Probabilistic Programming Semantics with Eli Sennesh

    Eli Sennesh is a recent graduate of the PhD program in computer science at Northeastern, in which I (Max) and many other BCC group members are currently enrolled. Eli's research is highly interdisciplinary, taking into consideration various topics in mathematics (statistics, measure theory,...

  48. 09/09/23: Transferable and Fixable Proofs with Bill Dalessandro

    Bill Dalessandro is a philosopher of science and mathematics at Oxford University. Today Bill joined us to discuss proofs -- specifically, what it means for a proof to be fixable, what it means for a proof to be transferable, and the apparent tension between these notions. This work built on…

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  49. 09/01/23: ChipSec with Nathaniel Mitchell and Dan Scott

    Today Nathaniel Mitchell and Dan Scott joined us from Intel to discuss the ChipSec project, an open-source platform security assessment framework, available at https://github.com/chipsec/chipsec . Specifically, ChipSec "is a framework for analyzing the security of PC platforms including hardware,...

  50. 08/12/23: Packing Chromatic with Bernardo Anibal Subercaseaux Roa

    Bernardo Anibal Subercaseaux Roa Marijn Heule. He has a background in engineering and is passionate about mathematics and computer science. Bernardo's research attacks the following question from a variety of angles: what can and cannot be done (efficiently?) by a computer? Today, Bernardo joined...

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ABOUT THIS SHOW

The Boston Computation Club is a small seminar group focused on mathematical computer science, and computational mathematics. Its name is plagiarized from the London Computation Club. Boston Computation Club meetings occur roughly every other week, on weekends, around 5pm EDT (modulo speaker availability). The usual format is a 20m presentation followed by 40m of discussion. Some, but not all, meetings are posted on YouTube and in podcast form.

HOSTED BY

Max von Hippel

CATEGORIES

science mathematics

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes does Boston Computation Club have?

Boston Computation Club currently has 89 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.

What is Boston Computation Club about?

The Boston Computation Club is a small seminar group focused on mathematical computer science, and computational mathematics. Its name is plagiarized from the London Computation Club. Boston Computation Club meetings occur roughly every other week, on weekends, around 5pm EDT (modulo speaker...

How often does Boston Computation Club release new episodes?

Boston Computation Club has 89 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.

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You can listen to Boston Computation Club on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.

Who hosts Boston Computation Club?

Boston Computation Club is created and hosted by Max von Hippel.
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