Hariri Institute for Computing, Boston University

Congratulations to Hariri Junior Faculty Fellow Dillon Brout for receiving the 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize — one of the most coveted honors for early-career scientists and part of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awards, widely known as the “Oscars of Science.” Read more: spr.ly/6011BBEUaU

Catch up on upcoming events, faculty highlights, and new opportunities from across the Hariri Institute in our April newsletter: spr.ly/6012B6Ar7w

BU SAIL won a $400K Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to advance an open-source initiative making generative AI more reproducible, secure, and accessible across higher education. Building on a successful pilot, the project now moves toward a scalable, community-driven platform. spr.ly/6016B6NJOp

Huge congrats to our Director, Yannis Paschalidis, on his induction into the @AIMBE College of Fellows! 🎓 From federated learning to global disease surveillance, Yannis is bridging the gap between technical innovation and human health. spr.ly/6013B62rzc #BU #AI #Bioengineering #Innovation @busph @busystems @ecebostonu @BUexperts

Join us! On Thursday, April 16, Ming Chen will join us for a Center for Computational Science Seminar to discuss how integrating physical principles at inference time, during model design, and within model architectures can substantially improve the accuracy, data efficiency, and transferability of AI-for-science frameworks spr.ly/6011B6LjaF

Join us on April 15 for Marshall Van Alstyne’s CyberAlliance talk, "Using Markets to Curb Misinformation," exploring how market design and financial accountability mechanisms like Truth Warrants may reduce false claims without censorship or centralized moderation. 4:30–5:45 PM | LAW Faculty Lounge, 15th floor | spr.ly/6014B6IOSp

This Tuesday! Join us for a CISE/Hariri Institute Distinguished Seminar with Francesco Bullo, Distinguished Professor and Mosher endowed chair of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. spr.ly/6018B6LZUQ

Is there life beyond PCA? Find out at the ECE/Hariri Institute Seminar with Bruno Sinopoli (Arizona State University) — presenting linear methods for dimensionality reduction that rival autoencoders, kernel PCA, and UMAP. 📅 April 16, 11 AM–12 PM | CDS 1101 Details: spr.ly/6010B6xRyq

Today is Boston University's Giving Day! Give a gift to the Hariri Institute today to empower BU's AI, computing, and data science researchers: spr.ly/6013B6aPBN

Congrats to Manos Athanassoulis — named a 2025 IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Contributor. Fewer than 0.5% of IEEE CS members receive this recognition in a given year. spr.ly/6014B6gLFY

Welcome to our newest faculty affiliates at the Hariri Institute: Vassilis Digalakis Nathanael Fillmore Kinan Dak Albab Nese Lortlar Ünlü Read more about them here: spr.ly/6011B6ndBN

Can the United States' constitutional democracy survive another 250 years in the age of AI? Fordham's Catherine Powell — Eunice Hunton Carter Distinguished Research Scholar & Professor of Law — will connect algorithmic discrimination, surveillance, and constitutional democracy. BU, 3/25, 4:30 PM. spr.ly/6015B6njHh

Bill Freeman, a Thomas and Gerd Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT EECS, recently completed a 40-year-long project — a project he'll review at our Distinguished Speaker Seminar on Tuesday, March 24! This event is co-sponsored by the BU Artificial Intelligence Research (AIR) Initiative and the Hariri Institute. Learn more: spr.ly/6018B6RCOn

🔐 Join us Wednesday, March 18 for a CyberAlliance Seminar with Morgan Weiland, Assistant Professor of Communication Law at Boston University College of Communication, as she presents "Courtroom as Laboratory: How the Reno Litigation Produced Legal Facts and Knowledge about the Internet."

Join us for the MedAI Hack on April 10 & 11 as we tackle real biomedical problems using AI/ML on de-identified clinical datasets—imaging, EHR, genomics, and more. Limited spots and up to $10K in prizes! Register by April 3: spr.ly/6019hCY8c

@BU_Tweets’s Evidence-Based AI in Learning (EVAL) Industry Collaborative today announced @AmiraLearning as the winner of its inaugural EVAL EdTech Evaluation Challenge. Learn more about the challenge and the importance of independent evaluation in EdTech: spr.ly/6015h4slL

What's next for AI regulation after Europe's landmark AI Act? Join Professor Céline Castets-Renard on March 5, 4–5 PM at BU's Barrister's Hall for an insightful conversation on the future of AI regulation. spr.ly/6015hNE8J

This Wednesday! Join the Center for Computational Science as they co-sponsor a Greater Boston TheoChem Seminar with Connor Coley, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT Talk Title: Computer-aided synthesis planning: the basics & beyond Abstract: Much progress has been made in recent years toward the development of computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) programs capable of recommending retrosynthetic pathways to molecules of interest. Modern programs make use of machine learning techniques to learn feasible retrosynthetic disconnections from databases of published organic reactions. In the first half of the talk, I will discuss the key components of CASP and the variety of approaches that have been taken by our group and others to address them. In the second half, I will focus on a couple of recent research directions we have undertaken to (i) improve our ability to ideate pathways for complex molecules, (ii) make recommended pathways more experimentally actionable, and (iii) critically evaluate the feasibility of proposed transformations.

We're pleased to welcome four new faculty affiliates: Nikolaos Daskalakis and Gareth Morgan (@BUMedicine), and Koichiro Shiba and Meredith Brooks (@BUSPH )! Learn more about their research: spr.ly/6014h5xOQ