Presentations this week
Monday, June 15, 2026
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Basis Transformer as a Foundation Model for Multimodal Tabular Representation Learning
William Loh, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Pascal Poupart
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
Distinguished Lecture Series
Alan Turing and me
Gilles Brassard, Professor and 2025 ACM A. M. Turing Laureate
Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal
11:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 1302 | Online distinguished lecture
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Explainable AI
Atomic Explanations for Retrieval-Augmented LLM Systems
Joel Rorseth, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • DC 3301
Supervisor: Professor Lukasz Golab
Seminar • Algorithms and Complexity
A Strong Linear Programming Relaxation for Weighted Tree Augmentation
Nathan Klein, Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, Boston University
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online seminar
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Parallel Efficient Secure DBSCAN Approximation
Mohannad Shehata, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Florian Kerschbaum
PhD Seminar • Programming Languages
Tensor Probabilistic Model Checking of Finite-Horizon Markov Chains
Jianlin Li, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
4:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Yizhou Zhang
Upcoming presentations
Monday, June 22, 2026
PhD Defence • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Evolving Trade-offs Towards Deployable Private Systems for Data Science
Thomas Humphries, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 3317 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Florian Kerschbaum
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Data Systems
LLM-Based Frameworks for Information Retrieval Evaluation
Shivani Upadhyay, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisor: Professor Jimmy Lin
PhD Defence • Systems and Networking
Efficient High-precision Monitoring of Network Slices for 5G and Beyond Networks
Niloy Saha, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • DC 1331
Supervisor: Professor Raouf Boutaba
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
PhD Defence • Programming Languages
Design and Implementation of Probabilistic Programming Languages for Sound and Scalable Inference
Jianlin Li, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Yizhou Zhang
PhD Defence • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Assumption Stress-Testing for Machine Learning Security
Andre Kassis, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:30 a.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Urs Hengartner
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Software Engineering
Trade-offs in Generic Programming: A Cross-Language Performance Study
Daniel Pang, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Watt
PhD Seminar • Data Systems
Query Expansion in the Era of Large Language Models
Amin Bigdeli, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • DC 3301
Supervisors: Professors Charles Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Algorithms and Complexity
Multistroke Character Recognition Using Orthogonal Polynomial Representations
Arun Cheriakara Joseph, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Watt
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
UniMaia: Steering Chess Policies with Language for Human-like Play
Sherman Siu, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisors: Professors Lesley Istead, Jeff Orchard
PhD Defence • Algorithms and Complexity
Towards Fast, Safe and Persistent Concurrent Data Structures for Non-experts
Gaetano Coccimiglio, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 3317 | Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Trevor Brown, Peter Buhr
Friday, June 26, 2026
PhD Defence • Quantum Computing
Circuits, Codes and Capacity
Amolak Ratan Kalra, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Hybrid: QNC 2101 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Michele Mosca
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
PhD Defence • Data Systems
Development and Evaluation of Assistive AI Systems for Assessing News Trustworthiness
Dake Zhang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisor: Professor Mark Smucker
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
PhD Seminar • Data Systems
Diversed Model Discovery via Structured Table Discovery
Zhengyuan Dong, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • DC 3301
Supervisor: Professor Renée J. Miller
Thursday, July 9, 2026
PhD Defence • Bioinformatics
Deep Learning for Accurate and Reliable De Novo Peptide Sequencing: From Missing Fragmentation to Open Modification Discovery
Zeping Mao, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Ming Li
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Towards Foundation Models for Text-Rich Multimodal Tabular Data
William Loh, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Pascal Poupart
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