Computer Engineering seminars

Srini Devadas examines how hardware and cryptography can strengthen each other. Hardware can protect keys, monitor attacks in real time and reduce the trusted computing base, while hardware vulnerabilities can undermine software security. The talk presents research on accelerating cryptographic computation and using those capabilities to design more efficient protocols. It also asks how cryptography and new security definitions can guide the construction of secure hardware. Devadas is MIT's Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Hybrid: MIT Stata Center, Room 32-G449 (Kiva), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139; online via Zoom. Thursday 24 September 2026, talk at 19:00 EDT (UTC−4); in-person refreshments begin at 18:30. This public event is organized by the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM. Register through the organizer-linked Zoom form for either mode and indicate online or in-person attendance. For physical access, use the Stata Center entrance nearest Main Street, then the fourth-floor elevators.

The potential of machine learning and deep learning to advance artificial intelligence is driving a quest to build dedicated computers, such as neuromorphic hardware that emulate the biological processes of the brain. While the hardware technologies already exist, their application to real-world tasks is hindered by the lack of suitable programming methods. Advances at the interface of neural computation and machine learning showed that key aspects of deep learning models and tools can be transferred to biologically plausible neural circuits. Building on these advances, I will show that differentiable programming can address many challenges of programming spiking neural networks for solving real-world tasks, and help devise novel continual and local learning algorithms. In turn, these new algorithms pave the road towards systematically synthesizing machine intelligence in neuromorphic hardware without detailed knowledge of the hardware circuits.