Weekly Announcements

Presentations this week

Monday, June 22, 2026

PhD Defence • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Evolving Trade-offs Towards Deployable Private Systems for Data Science
Thomas Humphries, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 3317  |  Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Florian Kerschbaum

Master’s Thesis Presentation • Data Systems
LLM-Based Frameworks for Information Retrieval Evaluation
Shivani Upadhyay, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisor: Professor Jimmy Lin

PhD Defence • Systems and Networking
Efficient High-precision Monitoring of Network Slices for 5G and Beyond Networks
Niloy Saha, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • DC 1331
Supervisor: Professor Raouf Boutaba

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

PhD Defence • Programming Languages
Design and Implementation of Probabilistic Programming Languages for Sound and Scalable Inference
Jianlin Li, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314  |  Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Yizhou Zhang

PhD Defence • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Assumption Stress-Testing for Machine Learning Security
Andre Kassis, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:30 a.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Urs Hengartner

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Master’s Thesis Presentation • Software Engineering
Trade-offs in Generic Programming: A Cross-Language Performance Study
Daniel Pang, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Watt

PhD Seminar • Data Systems
Query Expansion in the Era of Large Language Models
Amin Bigdeli, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • DC 3301
Supervisors: Professors Charles Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri

Master’s Thesis Presentation • Algorithms and Complexity
Multistroke Character Recognition Using Orthogonal Polynomial Representations
Arun Cheriakara Joseph, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
2:00 p.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Watt

Thursday, June 25, 2026

PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence  |  Machine Learning
Multilingual Embeddings: Data, Training, and Understanding
Xinyu Crystina Zhang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:30 p.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Jimmy Lin

Master’s Thesis Presentation • Artificial Intelligence  |  Machine Learning
UniMaia: Steering Chess Policies with Language for Human-like Play
Sherman Siu, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314  |  Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisors: Professors Lesley Istead, Jeff Orchard

PhD Defence • Algorithms and Complexity
Towards Fast, Safe and Persistent Concurrent Data Structures for Non-experts
Gaetano Coccimiglio, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Hybrid: DC 3317  |  Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Trevor Brown, Peter Buhr

Friday, June 26, 2026

PhD Defence • Quantum Computing
Circuits, Codes and Capacity
Amolak Ratan Kalra, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:00 a.m. • Hybrid: QNC 2101  |  Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Michele Mosca

Upcoming presentations

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

PhD Defence • Data Systems
Development and Evaluation of Assistive AI Systems for Assessing News Trustworthiness
Dake Zhang, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
11:00 a.m. • DC 2314
Supervisor: Professor Mark Smucker

Wednesday, July 8, 2026

PhD Seminar • Data Systems
Diversed Model Discovery via Structured Table Discovery
Zhengyuan Dong, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
12:00 p.m. • DC 3301
Supervisor: Professor Renée J. Miller

Thursday, July 9, 2026

PhD Defence • Bioinformatics
Deep Learning for Accurate and Reliable De Novo Peptide Sequencing: From Missing Fragmentation to Open Modification Discovery
Zeping Mao, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
1:00 p.m. • Online PhD defence
Supervisor: Professor Ming Li

Friday, July 10, 2026

PhD Seminar • Symbolic Computation
Stability of Sobolev-Regularized Polynomial Differentiation Matrices
Deepak Singh Kalhan, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online PhD seminar
Supervisors: Professors Stephen Watt, Robert Corless

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 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

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