News & EventsDepartment Events & Announcements
Events
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Jul8
EVENT DETAILS
lessLarge-scale character simulations for real-time games such as Dwarf Fortress and
interactive experiences such as Bad News involve both large numbers of interacting sub
simulations and very large numbers of entities being simulated. This complexity is hard to
achieve at scale while also operating with real-time performance constraints.
Logic programming and rule-based systems are often chosen for tasks such as social
simulation because their use of declarative rules and predicates map well to rules of social
engagement. Unfortunately, they are often quite slow, due in part to its heavy use of pointer chasing, dynamic allocation, garbage collection, and runtime type-checking, making it difficult to use for large numbers of characters or high-frequency updates. Bottom-up execution of logic programs can provide the declarativity of logic programming without the performance issues for appropriate tasks. We argue that large-scale character simulations are a “sweet spot” for bottomup logic programming.
Despite the benefits of using such a performant bottom-up logic programming language
for creating large-scale character simulations, these simulations still often need to encode many of the same things – characters, locations, interactions, and relationships to name a few. These regular components can be described as temporal entities (things that come into and out of existence) and most simulations must typically track the set of temporal entities that exist in the current simulation step as well as their states, the events of these entities creation and destruction, and, when needed, the set of all temporal entities that have ever existed. However, without a standard language with which to describe temporal entities the creation of data structures and access patterns to encode for temporal entities could vary wildly depending on use case, and maintenance of all this extra code (code not directly involved in game logic) would be an unnecessary burden on developers. In this thesis we will argue that temporal entities can be declaratively authored from an ontology-based representation while still maintaining playable framerates. We present Simulog,
a very high-level declarative language for large scale character simulation based on ideas from the formal ontology literature. We will attempt to show that an ontology for these entities allows for the expressive and flexible creation of social simulations, enabling one to declaratively author a simulation with these ontological statements while maintaining very good performance.TIME Wednesday, July 8, 2026 at 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
LOCATION 3001, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Jensen Smith jensen.smith@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Jul13
EVENT DETAILS
lessModern cryptography, including multi-party computation, zero-knowledge
proofs and fully homomorphic encryption, offers provable privacy for
computations over sensitive data and enables a new generation of
applications. Applications span from privacy-preserving machine
learning and secure financial analytics to privacy-respecting
decentralized systems. Despite decades of progress, a persistent gap
remains between the theoretical efficiency of these protocols and the
performance demands of real-world deployments. This gap arises from a
disconnect between hardware-agnostic protocol design and how modern
hardware actually operates. Asymptotically optimal protocols routinely
rely on primitives that hardware executes slowly, and even hardware
aware protocols perform poorly when implementations ignore instruction
pipelines, memory hierarchy, and vector units. My work is motivated by
a core goal: to build secure computation primitives and systems that
are provably secure while remaining concretely practical on real
hardware.
In this talk, I will summarize my prior work spanning pseudorandom
correlation generators, garbled circuits, RAM-based MPC, oblivious
RAM, threshold FHE, and anonymous messaging. I will focus on three
examples of the co-design philosophy at the primitive level: a
maliciously secure distributed point function that closes the semi
honest–active gap at 50× less communication; a mixed-mode oblivious
RAM that allows public accesses and shaves the log factor and concrete
overheads for these operations, while matching the fully-private lower
bound; and a concretely efficient succinct garbling scheme that turns
rate-one garbled circuits from a theoretical curiosity into a
deployable tool. I will then present the forward-looking direction for
my ongoing and future research: extending the co-design methodology
from the CPU down to specialized accelerators, targeting large-scale
FHE workloads.TIME Monday, July 13, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
CONTACT Jensen Smith jensen.smith@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Jul20
EVENT DETAILSmore info
lessWe invite you to register for our upcoming Workshop on Advancing Theory, Research, and Practice for Generative AI in University-Level Computing Education, July 20, 2026 from 8 AM to 7 PM at Northwestern University’s Evanston Campus.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies are rapidly changing how we learn and engage with computing. As we learn and teach in these changing times, what are the questions that we must be asking and what considerations do we need to keep in mind to support just, inclusive, and caring learning environments for students of all backgrounds and interests?
We invite researchers and practitioners who study or teach computing at the university-level to join us for an interactive one-day workshop. The workshop will consist of talks from four invited speakers interspersed with breakout sessions to continue discussion, plan changes to your classes, and foster new research projects and collaborations.
Our invited speakers are:
Kevin Lin (University of Washington)
Benji Xie (University of Denver)
Jamie Gorson Benario (Google)
Sepehr Vakil (Northwestern University)Register here by July 10.
More information about the workshop: https://sites.northwestern.edu/genaicomputinged/. This workshop is supported by the Northwestern Computer Science Department and Dolby Laboratories. Please contact Melissa Chen (melissac @ u.northwestern.edu) with questions.
Best,
Melissa Chen and Mike Horn, on behalf of the workshop organizersTIME Monday, July 20, 2026 at 8:00 AM - 7:00 PM
LOCATION Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Melissa Chen melissac@u.northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Sep24
EVENT DETAILS
lesstba
TIME Thursday, September 24, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Sep28
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
September 28 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
TBATalk Title
TBAAbstract
TBABiography
TBA---
Zoom Link
Panopto LinkTIME Monday, September 28, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Oct5
EVENT DETAILS
lessMonday / CS Seminar
October 5 / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514Speaker
Brian Suchy, Software Engineer Google DeepMindTalk Title
Formal Relational Equivalence for SQL, GenAI, and BeyondAbstract
Verifying that complex query rewrites from database optimizers or AI-driven generators preserve exact bag semantics under three-valued logic is an NP-hard challenge. To address this, we present an MLIR-native compiler framework that formally reasons about relational algebra. By decoupling query semantics from specific execution engines and lowering queries into a unified Relational Algebra Intermediate Representation, our language-agnostic methodology definitively proves semantic equivalence across all possible database states.The core of the presentation will deep-dive into our multi-tiered proving architecture, which synthesizes several advanced academic methodologies. First, we utilize E-Graphs and Equality Saturation to rapidly explore the equivalence space and detect structural congruence between query abstract syntax trees using fast, algebraic rewrite rules. Second, we employ Semiring Arithmetic, treating relational algebra as expressions over K-relations to leverage algebraic simplification and canonical forms under semiring laws. Finally, we implement a First-Order Logic and SMT translation path, lowering Relational Algebra into Relational Calculus and then into First-Order Logic to evaluate constraints and domain-specific axioms using parallel solvers like Z3 and CVC5, which either formally proves equivalence or synthesizes concrete counter-examples.
Finally, we will discuss the practical implications of combining these formal mathematical methods with modern compiler design. Attendees will leave with a comprehensive understanding of how bridging database theory, equality saturation, and SMT solving can create robust solutions for verifying query optimizers, enforcing semantic correctness, and validating automated SQL generation at scale.
Biography
Brian Suchy is a Software Engineer within Google DeepMind.
In his time at Google he has worked on F1 Query (Google's internal SQL query engine), hardware development, and (of course) AI.
Prior to joining Google, Brian received his PhD student at Northwestern University, advised by Peter Dinda, with a focus on hardware/software codesign and memory management.Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Query Processing and Formal Logic
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Zoom Link
Panopto LinkTIME Monday, October 5, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Oct29
EVENT DETAILS
lesstba
TIME Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)
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Nov19
EVENT DETAILS
lesstba
TIME Thursday, November 19, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 3514, Mudd Hall ( formerly Seeley G. Mudd Library) map it
CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)