CS BYTE 

Important Dates and Events 

 ORIENTATION 

More information about Orientation can be found here.

Check out the Fall Orientation Elective Sessions schedule here.

 IMPORTANT DATES 

 UPCOMING DEPARTMENT EVENTS 

Resources and Opportunities

 CS UNDERGRADUATE ADVISING 

Drop-in Advising starts next Tuesday, September 1, 2026

In Person in CDS 614

• Mondays 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
• Tuesdays 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
• Wednesdays 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (ONLY October 21 through November 25)

Virtual (Click here to sign-in during drop-in hours)

• Thursdays 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
• Fridays 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Questions? Visit the Academic Advising & Appointments page or email csadvise@bu.edu.

 FY101 

All new students are encouraged to register for FY101, a one-unit class that serves as a semester-long introduction to BU. Read more about FY101 course and registration.

CS & MA Sections for FY101 FALL26:

• Mondays 2:30 PM – 3:20 PM with Michael Coulombe
• Wednesdays 12:20 PM – 1:10 PM with Libby James
• Thursdays 3:35 PM – 4:25 PM with Stacie Nardizzi

 UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FUNDING OPPORTUNITY 

Apply by September 11 at noon. The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) is now accepting applications for two types of stipends:

• Student Research Award: Fully funded by UROP.
• Faculty Matching Grant: Funding shared equally between UROP and the faculty mentor's research funds. For more information, visit the UROP website and reivew the eligibility requirements.

 PAID NLP RESEARCH STUDY @ BU 

BU's tinlab is seeking CS students to participate in a study about incorporating AI tools in research ideation. All levels of experience are welcome. Questions? Email dagali@bu.edu. 

Apply here.

 CAREER RESOURCES 

The Department of Computer Science Career Resources webpage has information about career resources and upcoming events. 

Join the BUCS LinkedIn Group! Connect with us on LinkedIn for the latest on research, achievements, events, and opportunities. 

News and Spotlights

 RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 

• “A Systematic Study of Cross-Modal Typographic Attacks on Audio-Visual Reasoning” by PhD student Tianle Chen and Deepti Ghadiyaram reveals that AI systems designed to process audio, video, and text together have a surprising weakness: when attackers coordinate attacks across all three modalities simultaneously, these systems fail dramatically more often. Read the paper.

• “Semantic Richness or Geometric Reasoning? The Fragility of VLM’s Visual Invariance” by PhD student Xavier Thomas and Deepti Ghadiyaram was accepted to the Third Annual Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026. This research reveals that leading vision-language models excel at recognizing objects in photos but struggle with geometric reasoning: they fail to identify rotated or scaled images once semantic cues are removed, relying on memorized patterns rather than true visual geometric reasoning. This gap has real implications for spatially-demanding applications like robotics. Read the paper and view the project website.

• Publications and achievements from the Complex Analytics & Scalable Processing Systems Lab (CASPLab):

  • The paper “CryptDough: A unified analytics engine for secure multiparty computation” was accepted for publication at the 32nd Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2026). Congratulations to PhD student Muhammad Faisal for leading the effort and to co-authors Alessandra Lanz, Sam Buxbaum, Adam Godel, Vasiliki Kalavri, Mayank Varia, and John Liagouris. Read the paper.

  • The paper “Koala: Non-disruptive Reconfiguration for Long-running Stateful Dataflows” was accepted for publication at the 24th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2027). Congratulations to PhD student Lei Huang for leading the effort and to co-authors Sakshi Sharma, Chenxu Yu, Zikun Wang, Yuanli Wang, Zichen Zhu, John Liagouris, and Vasiliki Kalavri.

  • Adam Godel, UROP Summer award winner and undergraduate researcher at CASPLab, was selected to participate in the SOSP’26 Student Research Competition (undergraduate category). The Competition will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, next month.

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