Outstanding second- and third-year undergraduates and first-year Masters students in Informatics and other STEM disciplines are invited to learn about cutting-edge research in computer science. Leading researchers will engage with attendees in their areas of expertise through short courses, seminars, discussions, and informal interactions.
Attendance is by invitation only. Required application materials include information about your undergraduate/graduate academic record, and a concise description of your key accomplishments to date.
You can apply to the first week of BOOST 26 @ Oropa (July 26 – July 31) by filling this form.
Applicants submitting their applications by July 10 will receive notification of their status by July 14. Submissions received after July 10 will be evaluated on a rolling basis until all positions are filled.
Participation to the event is free and food and accommodation will be provided to all participants.
The program is under construction
Who should apply?
Outstanding second- and third-year undergraduate and first year Masters students in Informatics and other STEM disciplines.
What is the deadline for applications? When will I hear back?
Applicants submitting their applications by July 10 will receive notification of their status by July 14. Submissions received after July 10 will be evaluated on a rolling basis until all positions are filled.
What if I am available for a subset of the days of the school? Can I attend partially?
Unfortunately, no. Students are expected to commit for the entire duration of the school.
Where are classes held?
In Oropa, classes will be held in the Sala Convegni of the Sanctuary.
What kind of accommodations will there be?
Students will be hosted in the Monte Mucrone rooms within the Sanctuary’s hospitality facilities. Typical accommodations consists of a double room, with private bath and wi-fi.
Do I need to bring a laptop?
Yes. Courses may include coding exercises.
Which language is spoken at the school?
All instruction will be in English.
How many students will be attending?
Approximately 70
What does it mean “first week” of BOOST?
The second week of BOOST 2026 will take place in Bologna from August 30 to September 4. The two weeks are independent events with independent selection processes.
Adrian Sampson is an associate professor in the computer science department at Cornell. He works on programming languages, computer architecture, and the abstractions that separate them. He is especially excited about languages and compilers that make it easy for anyone to construct and exploit specialized hardware accelerators. In a different era, he worked on approximate computing, the idea that we should design computers that compute worse answers.
Ittay Eyal is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion and an Associate Director at the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). Eyal completed his PhD at the Technion, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. He was awarded a 2018 Alon Fellowship and a 2022 Krill Prize. He is a co-author of “Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable,” which received the Test-of-Time Award at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference. His research focuses on performance and security in decentralized systems.
Compilers are the way that the computing ecosystem adapts to exploding diversity in both hardware and programming models. This short course is a hands-on introduction to the essential parts of a compiler “middle end,” which is where all the interesting work happens to represent, analyze, transform, and optimize programs. We will study program representations, local and global analyses, the data flow framework, and static single assignment form. The structure of the course will alternate between understanding algorithms and then implementing them to observe their effects on real code.
Hardware accelerators are the main route to scaling computational efficiency past the end of Moore’s law. Specialized mathematical functions form the heart of many application-specific accelerators. This category of hardware gains its efficiency from customizing numeric representations and elementary function implementations beyond what is possible in a general-purpose CPU. However, designing these mathematical circuits from scratch is a multifaceted and complex engineering problem. A math-to-hardware compiler is a hypothetical toolchain that translates an abstract mathematical expression over real numbers into an efficient hardware circuit. This talk will discuss some recent steps toward realizing math-to-hardware compilers, including optimizing “libm”-like functions and safely composing different specialized number formats.
Decentralized blockchain systems are virtual machines available to anyone with Internet access. Moreover, they are permissioness distributed protocols, where any node can join to become one of the system operators. Their design utilizes tools from distributed computing, game theory, and cryptography. This combination gives rise to fundamental questions on how to achieve security and fairness without sacrificing performance; in turn, it raises open questions in each of the aforementioned fields. This short course will survey the theory and design of the different layers of blockchain systems and discuss some of the open questions.
Front-running is a subtle and persistent problem for blockchains. A blockchain is a stateful virtual machine executing instructions called transactions. Users earn rewards by publishing functional transactions essential to the system. Attackers observe these transactions and publish their own ahead of the users’, seizing the reward and eroding users’ incentive to publish functional transactions. Preventing front-running means enforcing causality: If an attacker receives transaction txA and then publishes transaction txB, then txA must be ordered before txB. However, this causality is only observed by the attacker. Practical systems order transactions by bid amount, so transactions willing to pay more get executed first, but this only results in a bidding war eroding users’ rewards. Though numerous ordering approaches have been proposed, none achieves causality, leaving users vulnerable to front-running.
This talk will present PRECEDE, a mechanism-design approach that enforces transaction causality by removing the economic incentive to front-run. PRECEDE orders transactions by a power-weighted randomized lottery, whose winning probability grows super-linearly in the bid. The user’s strategy of publishing a transaction with a deterring bid forms an equilibrium where the attacker refrains from competing. Moreover, PRECEDE prevents the prominent sandwich attack, which relies on front-running. PRECEDE can be directly deployed in existing blockchains with a simple change to their transaction ordering mechanism.
Santuario di Oropa, Oropa
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