CS Colloquium

John Davis
Glatco

Stevenson 1300
Monday, August 31, 2026

Have you ever had an idea for a product or company but did not know what to do next? In this practical and candid talk, technology leader and entrepreneur John D. Davis, Ph.D. shares lessons from research, startups, product development, and founding companies, including what worked, what failed, and why people, customers, ownership, focus, and culture often matter more than the technology itself. John will discuss how to recognize problems worth solving, test ideas before making a major investment, use AI to build and learn faster, and explore entrepreneurship without giving up financial stability. No startup experience is required, only curiosity about how technology can turn an idea into something valuable.

Tim Doughty

Stevenson 1300
Monday, September 14, 2026

Xanda Schofield
Harvey Mudd College

Stevenson 1300
Monday, September 21, 2026

Shubbi Taneja + Spencer Greene
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Stevenson 1300
Monday, September 28, 2026

Brennan Freeze
NetApp

Stevenson 1300
Monday, October 5, 2026

Operating Systems such as Linux, Windows, and macOS are general purpose OS that work very well for the average user. However, they are unable to handle enterprise scale throughput of reads and writes at low latency. There are operating systems that specialize in just that, one of them being called ONTAP,  a data management operating system that relies on WAFL as its backbone. This talk is to go over what the data storage industry is like, what the filesystem WAFL is, and finally how reads and writes are scheduled on the system with a look into the file system scheduler, Waffinity.

Kelly Shaw
Williams College

Stevenson 1300
Monday, October 12, 2026

You've heard faculty members and university officials talk about students being involved in research. You may even have some friends who have started working on research in a lab in chemistry or physics.  But, you don't really know what it means to do research in computing.  You also don't know why you would get involved in research.  Surely only people who want to become a faculty member do research, right?  Not true. Actually, most people who get PhDs in computing fields work in industry.

In this talk, I'll start by discussing what it means to do computing research.  We'll address the questions of why you might want to get involved in a research project and what research might look like after you graduate with your undergraduate degree.  Lastly, I'll describe a variety of ways to start your research journey at different career stages: during your first or second year of university, your senior year of university, or after you've graduated from your undergraduate program and are working in industry or earning your MS.

If you're curious about research and have questions, this talk is for you!

Keegan Donley
Kizen

Stevenson 1300
Monday, October 19, 2026

Ryan Garfinkel
University of Central Florida

Stevenson 1300
Monday, October 26, 2026

Software pipelines play a vital role in automating the software development life cycle. However, they introduce a new vector for malicious actors to exploit. Pipeline code typically has broader permissions than the program code it acts on. Attackers can target the pipeline to extract credentials and inject backdoors into artifacts, indirectly modifying the program code. Recent research into pipeline hardening has found that pipeline isolation, running each phase in its own sandboxed environment reduces the attack surface and prevents prior attacks. But in practice, developers may not know what permissions each phase needs to run correctly. Using the broad capability of agentic AI, we propose an architecture to automate the specification and generation of sandboxes for development pipelines.

Dept Event

Overlook (Student Center, 3rd floor)
Monday, November 2, 2026

CS students, join us for Advise-a-palooza for Spring 2027 registration.

Anthony Flores
Brookhaven National Laboratory

Stevenson 1300
Monday, November 9, 2026