Presentations this week
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
On the Generalizability of AI-Generated Text Detection
Amir David, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Florian Kerschbaum
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Data Systems
Content-Based Recommendation System
Doaa Elfayoumi, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Charles Clarke
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Regression
Hossein Mohebbi, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2310 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Pascal Poupart
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence
Autonomous Driving System Rule Learning Using Expert-Defined Causality
Frédéric Bouchard, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki
PhD Defence • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Practically Efficient Protocols for Private Computation using Homomorphic Encryption
Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 3317 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Florian Kerschbaum
Friday, January 16, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence
Integrating Symbolic Reasoning into Large Language Models
Varun Dhanraj, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:30 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Chris Eliasmith
Upcoming presentations
Monday, January 19, 2026
Seminar • Bioinformatics
Computational Modeling of Single-cell and Spatial Omics for Insights into Development and Disease
Jia Zhao, Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Biostatistics, Yale University
10:30 a.m. • Online seminar
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Ancestry Deconvolution via Differential Privacy
Raiyan Chowdhury, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Florian Kerschbaum
Seminar • Systems and Networking
Towards Accelerator-Centric Computing
Gerasimos Gerogiannis, PhD candidate
Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
10:30 a.m. • DC 1304
PhD Seminar • Information Retrieval
Breaking Information Silos: Advancing Search Systems for Unified Information Seeking
Xueguang Ma, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • DC 3301
Supervisor: Professor Jimmy Lin
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models
Yimu Wang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:30 p.m. • Hybrid: E7 5419 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki
Friday, January 23, 2026
PhD Seminar • Computer Graphics | Human–Computer Interaction
Computational Methods for Colour Palette Comparison
Andreea Pocol, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:30 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Lesley Istead, Craig S. Kaplan
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Systems and Networking
Towards Green AI: Evaluating Energy Efficiency for Quantized LLM Inference
Petar Basta, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 am. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Khuzaima Daudjee
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy
Integrity in a World of AI
Bruce Schneier, Fellow and Lecturer
Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School
University of Toronto
1:30 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 1302 | Online talk
Friday, January 30, 2026
PhD Defence • Algorithms and Complexity | Quantum Computing
Lower Bounds on Average-Case and Non-Local Quantum Computation
Vahid Reza Asadi, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Hybrid: QNC 2101 | Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Richard Cleve, Mohammad Hajiabadi
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Mitigating the Modality Gap: Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection with Multi-modal Prototypes and Image Bias Estimation
Yimu Wang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:30 p.m. • Hybrid: E7 5419 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki