Presentations this week
Monday, July 13, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Data Systems
Evaluating LLM Robustness Under Adversarial and Conflicting Evidence in Health Question Answering and Claim Verification
Shakiba Amirshahi, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:30 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisors: Professors Charles Clarke, Amira Ghenai
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
A Unified Perturbation Framework for Analyzing Leaderboard Stability and Manipulation
Hosna Oyarhoseini, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisors: Professors Amir-Hossein Karimi, Jimmy Lin
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
PhD Seminar • Algorithms and Complexity
Container Lemmas and the Query Complexity of Graph Property Testing
Cameron Seth, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Eric Blais
PhD Defence • Information Retrieval
Breaking Information Silos: Advancing Search Systems for Unified Information Seeking
Xueguang Ma, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:30 p.m. • Hybrid: M3 4001 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Jimmy Lin
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Understanding Hour-Long Videos with Hybrid Mamba-Transformers
Weiming Ren, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
3:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2310 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
From Verifiable Rewards to Tool-Using Agents: VerlTool for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Dongfu Jiang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
4:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
Thursday, July 16, 2026
Seminar • Algorithms and Complexity
Paintability of Bipartite Graph
Annie Zeng, Undergraduate Student
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online research seminar
Upcoming presentations
Monday, July 20, 2026
PhD Defence • Programming Languages
Implementation Techniques for Lexical Effect Handlers
Cong Ma, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 3317 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Yizhou Zhang
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
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Learning to Understand and Generate Multimodal Contents Within a Unified Model
Weiming Ren, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
Friday, July 24, 2026
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Evolving the Knowledge Boundary in Agentic Visual Generation
Cong Wei, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • TBD
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
PhD Seminar • Symbolic Computation
Sobolev Regularized Polynomial Features for Robust Handwritten Symbol Recognition
Deepak Singh Kalhan, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Stephen Watt, Robert Corless
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. • DC 1304
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. • TBD
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
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. • TBD
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
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
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
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
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
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
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
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