Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM 7:00 PM, Thursday, 23 April 2026 MIT Room 32-G449 (Kiva) and online via Zoom Complexity of the Internet—An AI Observation Science Perspective Jeremy Kepner, MIT Please register in advance for this seminar even if you plan to attend in person at https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/6717750000324/WN_Z5KGSMQBSg2dzjM7s_X0mw After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.Indicate on the registration form if you plan to attend in person. This will help us determine whether the room is close to reaching capacity. We plan to serve light refreshments (probably pizza) before the talk starting at around 6:30 pm. Letting us know you will come in person will help us determine how much pizza to order. We may make some auxiliary material such as slides and access to the recording available after the seminar to people who have registered. Abstract: What does “normal” look like in a system that grows, adapts, and scales at extraordinary speed? How do its underlying patterns shift as the network expands from its early days to a billion-fold increase in scale? In this seminar, Dr. Kepner will explore how advances in high-performance, privacy-preserving AI graph analysis tools open new windows into the Internet’s behavior. His work sheds light on emergence, structure, and stability within this constantly changing global system. Dr. Kepner will explain the deep connections between graphs and matrices and more general mathematical concepts of semirings and associative (token) arrays that are the foundations of modern large language model (LLM) agentic AI systems. These mathematical concepts form the basis of the high performance GraphBLAS sparse matrix standard and the D4M (Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Model) associative array library that can analyze the largest networks in the world while preserving privacy. Bio: Dr. Jeremy Kepner is an MIT Lincoln Laboratory Fellow. He founded the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center and pioneered the establishment of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. He has developed novel big data and parallel computing software used by thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide. He has led several embedded computing efforts, which earned him a 2011 R&D 100 Award. Kepner has chaired the SIAM Data Mining conference, the IEEE Big Data conference, and the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference. Kepner is the author of two bestselling books, Parallel MATLAB for Multicore and Multinode Computers, and Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra. His peer-reviewed publications include works on abstract algebra, astronomy, astrophysics, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data mining, databases, graph algorithms, health sciences, plasma physics, signal processing, and 3D visualization. In 2014, he received Lincoln Laboratory's Technical Excellence Award. You can learn more about his work here: https://www.mit.edu/~kepner/ Kepner holds a BA degree in astrophysics from Pomona College and a PhD degree in astrophysics from Princeton University. He is a fellow of the Society of Industrial Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is a faculty advisor to the MIT SIAM student group. Directions to 32-G449 - MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA: Please use the main entrance to the Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street (the entrance closest to Main street) as those doors will be unlocked. Upon entering, proceed to the elevators which will be on the right after passing a large set of stairs and a MITAC kiosk. Take the elevator to the 4th floor and turn right, following the hall to an open area; 32-G449 will be on the left. (https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32) This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be hybrid (in person and online). Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list. Co-sponsored by: gbc/acm Speaker(s): Jeremy Kepner, Room: 32-G449 (Kiva), Bldg: MIT building 32, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/533802
