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Boston Computation Club: Daily Summaries Delivered
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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- Apr 18, 202658 min
An Extremely Short Proof of the Hairy Ball Theorem with Peter McGrath
Today Peter McGrathAn 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 concept in a clear and transparent manner. This was a really fun talk and really back to our roots as a group, doing pure math on an iPad and loving it! We hope you enjoy the talk as much as we did!
- Mar 9, 202657 min
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 language models with symbolic reasoning systems (ultimately, dispatch to SAT) as well as future research directions building on said work.
- Feb 18, 202648 min
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 joined us to talk about some really exciting work he completed at Amazon, and to expand on his general vision of where constrained inference problems are heading in the future.
- Feb 7, 202654 min
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.
- Jan 17, 202641 min
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 contract debugging/security, and cybersecurity/symbolic analysis, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
- Jan 5, 202657 min
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!
- Sep 15, 202559 min
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 approach to defining the security boundaries and limitations of AI tools, and it fostered one of the better discussions we've hosted in a while. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
- Aug 15, 202557 min
08/15/25: An LLM Agent for Functional Bug Detection in Network Protocols with Mingwei Zheng
Mingwei Zhenga 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 lies at the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Software Engineering. She builds LLM agents that combine program analysis with LLMs for deep codebase understanding that improve software correctness, robustness, and trustworthiness. Today Mingwei joined us to discuss some ongoing work which she previously presented at IEEE Security and Privacy LangSec, applying language models to bug detection in protocols with IETF RFCs. This was a great talk with deep, technical content and a good conversation. We hope you enjoy!
About 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.
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