The SACT Seminar is held weekly: this year (2026), the seminar takes place on Wednesdays, 12:30pm to 2:00pm, in the boardroom (Room 124) of the School of Computer Science Building (J12). (Food is served at 12:30pm; talks at 1pm.) If you are interested in giving a seminar, please contact Sam Polgar.
Schedule
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 25/02/2026 | Sam Polgar | Verification of Statistical Properties: Redefining the Possible |
| 04/03/2026 | Torben Scheele (TU Dortmund) | The Path-Width of Geometric Spanners and 2-Layer k-Matching-Planar Drawings |
| 11/03/2026 | Cameron Seth (University of Waterloo) | Graph Property Testing and the Container Method |
| 25/03/2026 | Kenny Chen | The Quantumly Fast and Classically Forrious |
| 01/04/2026 | Aravind Thyagarajan | Introduction to Groth16's SNARKs |
| 15/04/2026 | Aravind Thyagarajan | Introduction to Groth16's SNARKs (Part 2) |
| 22/04/2026 | Joachim Gudmundsson | Bicriteria approximation for minimum dilation graph augmentation |
| 06/05/2026 | Joy Qiping Yang | Parameterized Uniformity Testing in the Huge Object Model |
| 13/05/2026 | Pranav Ghorpade | Exact Discounted Sums in Markov Chains |
| 20/05/2026 | Lindsey Deryckere | Measuring the Similarity Between Curves under Rotation |
| 27/05/2026 | Jay Taylor | |
| 10/06/2026 | TBD | |
| 17/06/2026 | TBD | |
| 24/06/2026 | TBD |
2025 Schedule
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 12/02/2025 | Siu-Wing Cheng (HKUST) | Fréchet Distance in Subquadratic Time |
| 26/02/2025 | Clément Canonne | The Randomness Complexity of Differential Privacy |
| 12/03/2025 | Steven Galbraith (University of Auckland) | Open questions about group actions in cryptography |
| 26/03/2025 | Sam Sutherland | Tensor Networks and Their Use In Quantum Computing |
| 09/04/2025 | Eduardo Velloso | Algorithmic puzzles from HCI research |
| 30/04/2025 | Joachim Gudmundsson | Realistic input assumptions for geometric graphs |
| 07/05/2025 | Daniel Tubbenhauer | How good are (quantum) knot invariants? |
| 09/05/2025 | Peaker Guo | Algorithms and Combinatorics of String Net Frequency |
| 28/05/2025 3-4pm | Hakop Pashayan | Classical simulation of noisy quantum circuits via locally entanglement-optimal unravelings |
| 11/06/2025 | Abigail Gentle | Algorithms and Theory for Distributed Private Statistics |
| 18/06/2025 | Lindsey Deryckere | Efficiently Approximating Distances in c-packed Graphs |
| 06/08/2025 | Frédéric Magniez (CNRS) | Two applications of Grover Search for Quantum Distributed Computing |
| 03/09/2025 | Sam Polgar | An introduction to Zero-Knowledge Proofs - theoretical concepts and practical applications in privacy-preserving digital identity systems |
| 17/09/2025 | Shuei Sakaguchi | Local Routing on Ordered Theta-graphs |
| 24/09/2025 | Mook Kwon Jung (POSTECH) | Minimum-area convex hull problem |
| 01/10/2025 | Mid-semester Break | |
| 08/10/2025 | Aravind Thyagarajan | Timed Cryptography and its applications |
| 22/10/2025 | David Harvey | Integer multiplication is at least as hard as matrix transposition |
| 05/11/2025 | Zijin Huang | Faster Fréchet Distance under Translations and More |
| 09/12/2025 | William Umboh (University of Melbourne) | Learning-Augmented Online Algorithms for Nonclairvoyant Joint Replenishment Problem with Deadlines |