Boston Computation Club Max von Hippel

Shriram Krishnamurthi is a professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he researches (among other things) programming languages, software engineering, formal methods, HCI, security, and networking.  Today Shriram joined us to discuss his joint project with Kathi Fisler, Benjamin S. Lerner, and Joe Gibbs Politz, titled "A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing".  The project is a new vision of what it means to teach introductory computing with data as a first-class object, in the form of tables.  This was a really excellent talk with a lively discussion touching on data quality, student motivation and engagement, pedagogy, data visualization, the nature of computation both essentially and in social context, incorrect assumptions programmers make (about names, interfaces, data, etc.), and much, much more.  We had a lot of fun with this one and we hope you enjoy it too!



By the way, you can watch the video version of this talk, HERE.

Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and the author of Games: Agency as Art. Today he joined us to discuss his book, which covers the philosophy of all sorts of games: rock climbing, Dark Souls, judo, poker, dungeons and dragons, etc. The event took the form of an interview hosted by Wei Sun, a longtime group member who read Thi's book in detail and really vibed with it. This was one of the most engaged and dynamic conversations we've hosted and in contrast to other events which have had a heavily visual component, this one is mostly auditory, so should make a very good podcast-style experience. We're very grateful to Thi for joining us today and to Wei for hosting the event, and we hope you enjoy it post-hoc as much as we did live!



- The book: https://www.amazon.com/Games-Agency-As-Art-Thinking/dp/0190052082- Wei's blog: http://weiright.blogspot.com/2022/06/movie-review-everything-everywhere-all.html

- Wei's blog: http://weiright.blogspot.com/2022/06/movie-review-everything-everywhere-all.html

Elizabeth Coppock is a linguistics professor at BU. He research focuses on foundational topics in truth, reference, quantification, and measurement in natural language semantics, through the lens of specific empirical puzzles. Recently, one of our group members (Cheng Zhang) expressed interest in Elizabeth's work as it might relate to his own research in programming languages, so we reached out to Elizabeth and asked if she'd be willing to present to the seminar group. (This is one of my favorite things about running the group: when a group member expresses interest in some research paper, we can simply invite the lead author to give a presentation!). Elizabeth graciously agreed and gave one of the best presentations we've had in months, full of fascinating real-world examples of the often surprising ways that we use "per" in the English language, and the underlying mathematical complexity of said usage. This was an enormously fun talk and we really hope you enjoy it as much as we did! And thank you again to Elizabeth for presenting!

Matthias is a world-class scientist and highly influential computer programmer, and also the author of "How to Design Programs", a Computer Science 101 book which takes a fundamentally different approach than prior works. Today Matthias joined us to share his experience writing that book (and its many iterations), as well as his broader philosophy on how to instruct the next generation of thinkers and builders (not to mention, programmers). This was a highly instructive and somewhat philosophical talk and we really hope you enjoy it as much as we did! To learn more about Matthias, refer here: https://felleisen.org/matthias/

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!