Audience: Students
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Zhou, K. (CSE) – Toward Safer Frontier AI: From Evaluation and Red-Teaming to Alignment and Oversight
This dissertation investigates how to make modern AI systems safer as they grow more capable. It addresses two central sources of risk: malicious misuse, in which adversarial users coerce models into harmful behavior, and internal misalignment, in which models themselves pursue goals that diverge from human intent through deception, sandbagging, or other covert behaviors. The…
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Baskaran, D. (CM) – More than Just Fun: Exploring Meaningful Play, Communities of Play, and Relatedness of Play
Play is often seen as a form of entertainment, leisure, or childhood development. However, it also acts as a meaningful experience that shapes how people connect with others and interact with the world around them throughout their lives. Prior work on meaningful play and communities of play has mainly focused on individual experiences and participation,…
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Optimizing Your Internship: Insider Strategies on How to Thrive in the Workplace
An internship is more than just a summer job, it can be the ultimate launchpad for your career! Join us for a practical, insider-focused discussion designed to help you maximize your internship experience and position yourself for future offers and success. In this session, we’ll talk about ways to: Set goals and make a strong…
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Yang, D. (CSE) – Inner Monologue: a Pathway to Human-Like Reasoning for Complex Tasks
A central goal on the path toward general AI is to build systems capable of deliberative reasoning before action. Such systems should inspect what they know, identify what they need, seek or construct useful information, and revise their reasoning through intermediate cognitive states. This dissertation studies this goal through the lens of Inner Monologue (IM),…
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Tripoli: A Tale of Three Cities—reception, screening, and discussion with the filmmmaker
While living abroad, a filmmaker returns to Tripoli, Lebanon, to confront a hometown that once rejected him as a queer child. With a microphone in hand, he walks around coffee shops, public squares, and a park to ask the city’s inhabitants about their cultural and social beliefs and their embrace of new ideas. Gradually, he…
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Castro, S. (CSE) – Agentic AI for Security: Adversarial Foundations for Autonomous Cyber Operations
Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) agents promise effective security automation with minimal human intervention, yet their deployment raises three interconnected challenges: agents must be realistic (reproducing diverse attacker sophistication), secure (preventing autonomy from becoming an attack surface), and feasible (safely replicating human behavior at full autonomy). We argue that these three properties are requirements for ACO…
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The Creative Collective student arts event
The Creative Collective is a multidisciplinary student arts event designed to showcase and elevate the diverse creative work produced at UCSC. This event highlights student talent that often remains underrecognized while fostering a stronger sense of community among creatives by bringing together student artists across disciplines and colleges to showcase the collective creativity at UCSC!…
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Paul Pena, D. (CSE) – Efficient Pattern Counting in Sparse Graphs and Hypergraphs
Pattern counting is a fundamental problem in computer science with applications in many domains. For a fixed small pattern H, we are given a large graph G and we are asked to count the number of subgraphs or homomorphisms (edge-preserving maps) of H in G. For practical applications where the input graph can be very…
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Zhu, R. (ECE) – From Neuromorphic Principles to Efficient Neural Language Architectures
This dissertation investigates how neuromorphic and brain-inspired principles can guide the design of efficient neural language architectures. It addresses two central limitations of modern Transformer-based language models: memory growth with context length and high computational cost from dense matrix multiplication. Through studies of spiking neural networks, linear-recurrent language models, hybrid attention architectures, MatMul-free models, and…
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Bai, G. (BMEB) – Long-read single-molecule chromatin architecture and its role in transcriptome regulation
Sequencing technologies have revolutionized our understanding of biology, yet many existing methods require fragmentation of DNA or RNA, fundamentally limiting our ability to study these molecules in their native, intact forms. Long-read sequencing overcomes this constraint by enabling the sequencing of long, single-molecule native DNA and RNA, providing simultaneous access to both sequence and base…