Presentations this week
Monday, October 19, 2026
Data Systems Seminar Series
Redesigning Cloud Databases for AI Data Centers
Qizhen Zhang, Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
10:30 a.m. • DC 1304
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Understanding and Generating Visual Worlds with Foundation Models
Weiming Ren, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
PhD Seminar • Human–Computer Interaction
Vibes on Demand: Adding Vibrotactile Encoding to Line Charts Shows Experiential Benefits Without Performance Costs
Anchit Mishra, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • EC1 1237
Supervisors: Professors Matthew Brehmer, Oliver Schneider
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Controllable Image and Video Generation with Foundation Models
Cong Wei, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:30 p.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Wenhu Chen
PhD Seminar • Human–Computer Interaction
PGUI: A Pixel-Based User Interface Event Loop Driven by Generative Models
Mohammad Hasan Payandeh, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
3:30 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2310 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Jian Zhao
Upcoming presentations
Monday, October 26, 2026
PhD Seminar • Human–Computer Interaction
Surprise2Refine: Axis-Centered Exploration-To-Refinement for Agent-Assisted Creative Scaffolding
Yuzhe You, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:30 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Jian Zhao
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
PhD Defence • Systems and Networking
Architecting for Performance and Extensibility from Networking to Processors
Siyao Zhao, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • TBD
Supervisor: Professor Ali Mashtizadeh
Friday, October 30, 2026
PhD Seminar • Human–Computer Interaction
IntentLint: Supporting Intent Scaffolding and Prompt-time Linting in Human-AI Collaborative Data Analysis
Felicia Feng, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • DC 2314
Supervisors: Professor Anamaria Crisan, Jian Zhao
Monday, November 2, 2026
PhD Seminar • Computer Graphics
From Droplets to Ocean Waves: Multiscale Two-phase Fluid Simulation
Joel Wretborn, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisor: Professor Christopher Batty
Wednesday, November 4, 2026
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Approaches and Evaluation for Text Quality Improvement
Ankit Vadehra, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2584 | Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Pascal Poupart, Olga Vechtomova
Friday, November 6, 2026
PhD Seminar • Systems and Networking
Flexible RAN Slicing in Open RAN with Constrained Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Mohammad Zangooei, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • DC 1304
Supervisor: Professor Raouf Boutaba