Boston Computation Club

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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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!