Upcoming presentations
Tuesday, January 6, 2026
PhD Seminar • Artificial Intelligence
FedFormer: Contextual Federation with Attention in Reinforcement Learning
Liam Hebert, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
4:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Robin Cohen, Lukasz Golab
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
GASTON: Graph-Aware Social Transformer for Online Networks
Olha Wloch, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:30 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisors: Professors Lukasz Golab, Robin Cohen
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
Friday, January 9, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Systems and Networking
UringCL: A Lightweight io uring Convergence Layer for Adoption in Legacy Event Loops
Armin Afsharian, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 pm. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Martin Karsten
Master’s Research Paper Presentation • Software Engineering
Compiler Testing via Literal Value Mutation
Rui Ming Xiong, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:30 p.m. • DC 2314
Supervisors: Professors Joanne Atlee, Chengnian Sun
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
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
Friday, January 23, 2026
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
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