Presentations this week
Monday, July 27, 2026
Seminar • Human–Computer Interaction | Artificial Intelligence
Scaling Foundation Models & Agentic AI that Supports Healthy Living
Daniel McDuff, Senior Staff Research Scientist and Manager, Google
Affiliate Professor, University of Washington
10:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online seminar
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Learning to Evaluate and Improve Visual Generation from Human Preferences
Cong Wei, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
3:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Computer Science Museum
Spring Open House
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. to 4:00.p.m. • DC 1301
Guest speaker alumnus Michael Gardi will present A Sol-20 Reproduction: Scratching a 45-year-old itch at 12:30.p.m.
PhD Seminar • Bioinformatics
Recurrent Energy-Based Modeling of Side-Chain Allostery
Shun Saito, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisor: Professor Forbes Burkowski
PhD Seminar • Bioinformatics
Machine learning reveals genome-wide DNA sequence patterns associated with thermal adaptation in extremophile microbes
Monireh Safari, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Lila Kari
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Computational Finance
Data Scarcity and the Decumulation Problem: Two Challenges in Finance
Yuk Hei Boris Leung, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:30 p.m. • DC 2310
Supervisors: Professors Yuying Li & Peter Forsyth
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy
Breaking the Web is Good for Privacy
Eric Jollès, Doctoral student
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online talk
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Recent Advances in Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Cong Wei, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
3:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
Thursday, July 30, 2026
PhD Defence • Human-Computer Interaction
Tangible World-in-Miniature Interaction in Virtual Reality
Junhyeok Kim, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Hybrid: EC1 1237 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Mark Hancock
Friday, July 31, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Human–Computer Interaction
Technology-mediated Group Idea Generation and Evaluation for Artistic Creations Across Disciplines
Anthony Maocheia-Ricci, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2310 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Edith Law
PhD Seminar • Human–Computer Interaction
Thinkink: 2D Spatial Ink-native Interaction with LLMs
Mohammad Hasan Payandeh, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
3:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 3317 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Jian Zhao
Upcoming presentations
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Semantics-Behavior Coupled Bayesian Optimization for Efficient Black-Box Prompt Search
Ruotian Wu, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Pascal Poupart
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Learning at Test Time: Adapting Models with Synthetic Data and Environment Interaction
Haonan Chen, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Victor Zhong
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Bioinformatics
Generative Synthetic Data for Pre-Clinical Drug Discovery
Bing Hu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:30 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Helen Chen & Anita Layton
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
“Nothing Can Make Device Sharing Feel Safer...” Privacy and Security Challenges in Collectivist Immigrant Families
Shanza Shanza, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • DC 3317
Supervisors: Professors Urs Hengartner & Leah Zhang Kennedy
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
OpenResearcher: Reproducible Training for Long-Horizon Deep Research Agents
Dongfu Jiang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
Seminar • Bioinformatics | Artificial Intelligence
Advancing Drug Discovery with FAIR Data and Explainable AI in Biomedical Research
Michel Justin Dumontier, Distinguished Professor of Data Science
Maastricht University
2:00 p.m. (Subject to change) • MC 5501
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Beyond Semantic Similarity: Direct Corpus Interaction for Agentic Search
Dongfu Jiang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
4:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Programming Languages
Transitioning to Explicit Nulls in Scala
Harris Lau, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:30 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Ondřej Lhoták
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Towards Auditable Properties of Machine Learning System
Prach Chantasantitam, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor N. Asokan
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Algorithms & Complexity
Algorithms for Analytic Combinatorics: Positivity Bounds and D-finite Operators
John Smith, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2306C | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisors: Professors Stephen Melczer & Rafael Oliveira
Friday, August 7, 2026
PhD Seminar • Programming Languages
The Defensive Tax: Price of Defenses That Never Defend
Cong Ma, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Yizhou Zhang
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
PhD Seminar • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
IPFSCover: Examining Website Fingerprinting Threats in the InterPlanetary File System
Michael Wrana, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Diogo Barradas & N. Asokan
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
ASH: Agents that Self-hone via Embodied Learning
Benjamin Schneider, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
3:00 p.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisors: Professors Wenhu Chen & Florian Kerschbaum
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Master's Thesis Presentation • Programming Languages
Reified Generic Types for Scala 3 on the JVM
Jin Xu, Master's candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online master's thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Ondřej Lhoták
Thursday, August 13, 2026
PhD Seminar • Software Engineering
Context-Aware CodeLLM Eviction for AI-assisted Coding
Kishanthan Thangarajah, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Meiyappan Nagappan
Friday, August 14, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Algorithms & Complexity
On the Black-Box Impossibility of Hardness in TFNP from One-Way Functions
Anas Ibrahim, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:30 p.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Mohammad Hajiabadi
Monday, August 17, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Abstract Reasoning with Vector Symbolic Algebras
Isaac Joffe, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2310 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Chris Eliasmith
PhD Seminar • Formal Methods
Counterexample Guided Abstraction and Refinement in Dash Models
Aditya Shankar Narayanan, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
4:00 p.m. • DC 2564
Supervisor: Professor Nancy Day
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Systems and Networking
Runtime Configuration of GPU Workloads for Energy-efficient Execution
Qishen Wu, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisor: Professor Martin Karsten
Thursday, August 20, 2026
PhD Seminar • Software Engineering
Decoupling CLI Agent Scaffolding to Internalize Planning Across Scaffolds
Kishanthan Thangarajah, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Meiyappan Nagappan
Friday, August 21, 2026
PhD Seminar • Software Engineering
SLA-Awareness for AI-assisted coding
Kishanthan Thangarajah, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Meiyappan Nagappan
Thursday, September 3, 2026
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Gradient-based Methods for Multi-Objective Optimization with Applications in Machine Learning
Zeou Hu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • DC 2310
Supervisor: Professor Yaoliang Yu