CDS STUDENT
SEMINAR
SERIES

Join us every Friday at Boston University Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences (CDS) for cutting-edge research presentations by CDS PhD students across data science, AI, and beyond.

Fridays • 12–1 PM • CDS 1646

What We Do

We are a student-run initiative within the PhD department of Boston University Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, dedicated to fostering knowledge sharing and academic growth across our community.

Our Mission?

Create a space where students can explore, present, and discuss the research topics they're passionate about in a supportive, collaborative environment.

Every Friday from 12:00 to 1:00 PM in CDS 1646, CDS researchers present on work that excites them—whether it's their current research, an inspiring paper they've discovered, or a hands-on workshop in their area of expertise. From artificial intelligence to biological sciences, our seminars cover the full breadth of computer and data science.

Meet the Organizers

The students who run the series week to week.

Freddy Reiber

Freddy Reiber

Freddy is a fifth-year PhD student in the Computing and Data Science department at Boston University, and advised by the fantastic Allison McDonald. His work explores how power dynamics are shifted by technology with a focus on applying human-driven methods to complex issues. Currently, his projects are on 2nd order dynamics in digital spaces within labor unions and the motivations used by cryptographers for their research.

Lingyi Xu

Lingyi Xu

Lingyi Xu is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University. She seeks solutions to data missingness in multimodal learning across visual, tabular, and text data. Her work investigates how heterogeneous, incomplete data modalities can be represented and aligned to make learning more adaptable and their relationships more interpretable.

Yan (Stella) Si

Yan (Stella) Si

Stella is a PhD student at Boston University Computing and Data Sciences, where she works at the intersection of cognitive science and AI.

Her research centers on modeling human decision making, combining neural networks with traditional cognitive models to uncover the psychological principles behind how we choose. She is also building large-scale, high-quality datasets to drive this work forward.

Coming Up

AIEnvironmental ScienceSocial ScienceFriday, November 20, 2026

Cybersecurity for Immigrant Rights Organizations & Data assimilation under environmental disturbance

by Tyler Calabrese & Jacob Epstein

Tyler: Tyler will discuss a recently-submitted paper on cybersecurity for immigrant rights organizations in the Northeast United States, as well as an accompanying cybersecurity workshop the authors are offering based on the study findings.

Jacob: In this talk, I will present a novel method for state data assimilation which extends to scenarios where the remotely sensed data constraints exhibit environmental disturbance - large discrete jumps in the observation time series indicative of forest fires, pest outbreaks, or some other form of disturbance. Unlike the traditional ensemble kalman filter, this method produces multimodal forecast and analysis distributions, allowing it to capture discrete jumps in the observation time series. The method also dynamically updates uncertainty of the ecological process model conditional on observations and disturbance priors.

Location: CDS 1646Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Get Involved

Ready to join our community of learners, researchers, and innovators?