Cybersecurity for Immigrant Rights Organizations
by Tyler Calabrese
Data assimilation under environmental disturbance
by Jacob Epstein
About
Tyler: Tyler will discuss a recently-submitted paper on cybersecurity for immigrant rights organizations in the Northeast United States, as well as an accompanying cybersecurity workshop the authors are offering based on the study findings.
Jacob: In this talk, I will present a novel method for state data assimilation which extends to scenarios where the remotely sensed data constraints exhibit environmental disturbance - large discrete jumps in the observation time series indicative of forest fires, pest outbreaks, or some other form of disturbance. Unlike the traditional ensemble kalman filter, this method produces multimodal forecast and analysis distributions, allowing it to capture discrete jumps in the observation time series. The method also dynamically updates uncertainty of the ecological process model conditional on observations and disturbance priors.
Details
- Date:
- Friday, November 20, 2026
- Time:
- 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
- Location:
- CDS 1646
- Theme:
- AI, Environmental Science, Social Science
Speakers

Tyler Calabrese
Tyler Calabrese is a PhD student at Boston University's Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, working with Allison McDonald. Previously, he worked as a Software Developer at Strike Technologies and earned his Bachelor's in Computer Science and English from Tufts University. His research interests include usable privacy and security, particularly in the context of state and workplace surveillance.

Jacob Epstein
Jacob Epstein is a 1st-year PhD student at Boston University's Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. As an undergraduate, he worked on multiple projects applying machine learning techniques to data analysis problems in environmental science, and received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His current research interests are in applications of statistical and learning-based methods to environmental science.