Presentations this week
Monday, November 24, 2025
Seminar • Data Systems
The VAST Data Exascale AI Platform
Vlad Zdornov, Lead, VAST Data R&D Center
Moshe Gabel, Senior Software Engineer
VAST Data
10:30 a.m. • DC 1302
PhD Defence • Human–Computer Interaction
VR Streaming as a New Frontier: Investigating Virtual Camera as a Multifaceted Bridge Between Streamers and Viewers
Liwei Wu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Jian Zhao
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
PhD Seminar • Bioinformatics | Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Knowledge-infused Conditional Generative Models for Drug Discovery Synthetic Data
Bing Hu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Anita Layton, Helen Chen
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
PhD Seminar • Bioinformatics
Enhancing DNA Foundation Models to Address Masking Inefficiencies
Monireh Safari, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Lila Kari
PhD Seminar • Natural Language Processing | Information Retrieval
Étude in Modern Information Access: On Building Effective Rerankers and Benchmarking RAG Systems
Ronak Pradeep, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 3301 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Jimmy Lin
Seminar • Algorithms and Complexity
Space Complexity for Approximate All-pairs Max Flows
Thatchaphol Saranurak, Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online seminar
Friday, November 28, 2025
PhD Defence• Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) | Platform Security
Hardware-Assisted Defenses for Data Integrity and Confidentiality
Hossam ElAtali, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor N. Asokan
PhD Seminar • Computational Rhetoric
A Knowledge Representation for, and an Application to Requirements Elicitation of, Rhetorical Figures of Perfect Lexical Repetition
Yetian Wang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Daniel Berry, Grant Weddell
PhD Seminar • Systems and Networking
Rethinking Telemetry Design for Fine-Grained Anomaly Detection in 5G User Planes
Niloy Saha, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • DC 1304
Supervisor: Professor Raouf Boutaba
Upcoming presentations
Monday, December 1, 2025
PhD Defence • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) | Mobile Security
Cues, Clones, and Cars: Access Control Issues in Customized Android
Parjanya Vyas, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors N. Asokan, Yousra Aafer
PhD Seminar • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
On the Adaptive Security of Key-Unique Threshold Signatures
Chelsea Komlo, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Ian Goldberg, Douglas Stebila
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
PhD Defence • Natural Language Processing | Information Retrieval
Democratizing and Modernizing Information Access: From Open Rerankers to Scalable RAG Evaluation
Ronak Pradeep, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:30 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Jimmy Lin
PhD Defence • Systems and Networking
Mitigating Risks to Dependability from Vibe-Coding Embedded Systems
Murray Dunne, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Sebastian Fischmeister
PhD Seminar • Data Systems
Maximizing a Practical Utility Objective for Differentially Private Linear Queries
Karl Knopf, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 3301 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Xi He
Thursday, December 4, 2025
PhD Defence • Algorithms and Complexity
Algebraic Geometric Methods for Algorithms in Satisfiability, Irreducibility of Varieties, and Identity Testing
Abhibhav Garg, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Rafael Oliveira
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Data Systems Seminar Series
Enabling Fast and Correct Approximate Query Processing in HTAP Systems
Zhuoyue Zhao, Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo
10:30 a.m. • DC 1302
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Data Systems
Parallel Oblivious Joins using Radix Partitioning
Nafis Ahmed, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:30 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisor: Professor Sujaya Maiyya
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Human–Computer Interaction
Exploring Gender and Gender-Based Stereotyping in a Voice Agent Running Coach
Casey O’Neill, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Edith Law
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
PhD Defence • Software Engineering
Pushing the Limit of Language-Agnostic Program Reduction
Zhenyang Xu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Chengnian Sun
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Contextual AI: Integrating Macro-Context with Transformer Architectures for Social Media Analysis, Federated Learning, and Recommender Systems
Liam Hebert, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Robin Cohen, Lukasz Golab