Boston Computation Club Max von Hippel

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! 


LakYah's website: https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/home/lakyahtyner/index.html 
The paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/842

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.


Lindy Labs
Video version

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.

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.