CS Colloquium

Matthew Clark
Sonoma State University

Stevenson 1300
Monday, February 3, 2025

Deep learning technology is spurring innovation in the conservation and land management field, including the automation of satellite image analysis to track changes in ecosystems over large regions to the detection of species at a site level with acoustics. For the last 8 years, Dr. Clark from the Geography, Environment, and Planning (GEP) department has engaged with SSU Computer Science faculty and students in capstone and other course projects by providing applications and associated data for deep learning analysis. In this talk, Dr. Clark will provide an overview of these various projects and discuss how these experiences have spurred innovation and provided real-world learning opportunities for SSU CS and GEP students.

Shiva Jahangiri
Santa Clara University

Stevenson 1300
Monday, February 10, 2025

In today’s dynamic data systems, managing resources effectively is key to maintaining performance and fairness. This talk will present techniques for allocating memory among queries arriving unpredictably, ensuring efficient use of resources. We’ll explore methods to balance fairness across queries with diverse demands and latency needs, as well as strategies for prioritizing and ordering queries from different classes based on priority values. These approaches address the critical challenges of real-time query management in modern systems.

Abhishek Aich
NEC Laboratories

Stevenson 1300
Monday, February 17, 2025

“But what are transformers? Why such a name? How do these neural networks work? Why are they everywhere right now? What propelled their widespread adoption?” In this talk, we will explore possible answers to these questions, prominently focused on computer vision (i.e. vision transformers). Next, we will delve into my current research topics at NEC Laboratories, America which includes enhancing the efficiency of vision transformers to optimize performance-computational cost trade-offs. We will also see (and appreciate) the gap between cutting-edge research and actual deployments. Finally, I will share some personal insights on doing a PhD and pursuing a research career in industry.

Dept Event

Overlook (Student Center, 3rd floor)
Monday, April 7, 2025

CS students, join us for Advise-a-palooza for Fall 2025 registration.

Tapti Palit
UC Davis

Stevenson 1300
Monday, April 14, 2025

C and C++ remain two of the most widely used programming languages, powering everything from operating systems to critical infrastructure. However, their lack of built-in memory safety leaves applications vulnerable to exploitation, and memory corruption vulnerabilities cost the industry billions of dollars annually. To mitigate these risks, software defenses such as Control Flow Integrity (CFI) are deployed, but their effectiveness depends heavily on the precision of underlying program analysis.

In this talk, I will present my research on advancing program analysis techniques to improve software security. First, I will introduce the Invariant-Guided Pointer Analysis technique, which enhances the precision of CFI mechanisms by 59%, thus significantly improving its security guarantees. Then, I will discuss our lab's latest research on automatically transpiling C/C++ code into memory-safe languages, like Rust. Specifically, I will describe our hybrid approach, which combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with program analysis techniques to achieve high-accuracy C-to-Rust transpilation. Together, these efforts improve software security for legacy software and building a foundation for safer, more reliable software systems.

Dept Event

Stevenson 1300
Monday, April 28, 2025

Short presentations of research carried out by Sonoma State Computer Science Students, and CS awards.

Dept Event

Stevenson 1300
Monday, May 5, 2025

Short presentations of capstone projects carried out by Sonoma State Computer Science Students