Presentations this week
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
PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning
Physics-Constrained Learning for Scientific Discovery: Inference in Differential Equations and Inverse Design via Generative Models
Lena Podina, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
3:00 p.m. • Hybrid: M3 3001 | Online PhD defence
Supervisors: Professors Mohammad Kohandel, Ali Ghodsi
Friday, July 24, 2026
Seminar • Symbolic Computation
A Complete Validated Algorithm for the Initial Value Problem of Ordinary Differential Equations
Chee Yap, Professor
Department of Computer Science, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
11:00 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 1302 | Online seminar
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. • Online PhD seminar
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
Upcoming presentations
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. • Hybrid: DC 1304 | Online seminar
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. • Online PhD seminar
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. • Online PhD seminar
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
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Programming Languages
Transitioning to Explicit Nulls in Scala
Harris Lau, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
9:30 a.m. • Hybrid: DC 2314 | Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor Ondřej Lhoták
Master’s Thesis Presentation • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP)
Towards Auditable Properties of Machine Learning System
Prach Chantasantitam, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
10:00 a.m. • Online master’s thesis presentation
Supervisor: Professor N. Asokan
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