Boston Computation Club

Max von Hippel
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Boston Computation Club

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.

  1. 6 OCT

    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 approach his lab takes to such problems. Today Harry joined us to talk about his research into the problem of AirTag stalking, and how it can be ameliorated, while retaining acceptable performance, through cryptographic protocols. This was a very interesting talk with serious, real-world implications, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

    51 min

  2. 28 SEPT

    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 the remaining third presented a fantastic conversation about the future of AI, tool use, chain and tree of thought, o1, and more. Thanks again for joining us Ian!

    55 min

  3. 7 SEPT

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

    Dhekra Mahmoudat 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 Attacks on Protocols using Mix-Nets. This was a really interesting presentation with a good conversation afterword touching on some subtler points around the Dolev-Yao threat model, the limitations of ProVerif, and proof optimization.

    57 min

  4. 25 AUG

    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 haven't thought of yet, but right now, is pretty important for doing stuff on-chain. (I can easily imagine this being applicable to building something like a dweb version of AWS ... in some theoretical future where FHE is so good that you can just trust randos to run code for you). Anyway, Matej presented a super rad intro to Lurk, gave us a code demo (it worked!) and then enjoyed our usual über-nerd conversational segment at the end.

    1h 1m

  5. 17 AUG

    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, Efficient Synthesis of Symbolic Distributed Protocols by Sketching, to appear in FMCAD. This was a very interesting talk with a technical conversation afterword. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

    52 min

  6. 10 AUG

    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 using a mixture of AI techniques. Their system is slow, deliberate, and very high quality. You can check out Undermind at www.undermind.ai , or peruse the query I did during the Q&A section here: https://www.undermind.ai/query_app/display_one_search/c743b66ee4378b12ae8bad1fe58975ba95da71e7f7a1d5c2f0c6973c677648cc/

    58 min

  7. 27 JUL

    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 closed) so as not to wake up his wife due to a rather large time-zone delta, which was hilarious and a first for the Boston Computation Club. Anyway, this was a really fun talk with excellent Q&A and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

    1h 16m

  8. 6 JUL

    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 structure with some interesting background in theoretical CS. Arthur covered all this and more in his presentation, which was super interesting and a lot of fun to watch. Check out Arthur's original blog post here: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2024/03/03/infinite-craft-theory/ Check out Arthur's slides here: https://bstn.cc/artifacts/arthurODwyer/infiniteCraft.pdf

    53 min
See All (63)

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 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.

Information

  • Creator
    Max von Hippel
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2024
  • Episodes
    63
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Max von Hippel
  • Show Website
    Boston Computation Club

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