• Baskaran, D. (CM) – More than Just Fun: Exploring Meaningful Play, Communities of Play, and Relatedness of Play

    Virtual Event

    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, […]

  • Tu, H. (CSE) – From Evaluation to Adaptation: Building Reliable Multimodal Intelligence

    Virtual Event

    Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are rapidly becoming general-purpose AI systems, yet their capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to evaluate, improve, and validate their reliability in realistic use. Standard benchmarks mainly measure in-distribution final-answer accuracy, leaving critical gaps in safety, robustness, fine-grained reasoning evaluation, and reliability in real-world agentic settings. My research proposes […]

  • FINS: Fisheries Insights Narratives and Stories seminar series featuring Lisa Uttal

    Ocean Health Building McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA

    Please join us for the final talk in the FINS: Fisheries Insights Narratives and Stories seminar series featuring Lisa Uttal giving her talk, “Science Unlocked: Translating Research into Public Stewardship”.

    Preceding the talk please join us for a networking coffee hour (snacks provided) and a student-only lunch after the talk.

  • CSE Colloquium – Learning to Image: Computational Microscopy for Dynamic Systems

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Laura Waller, UC Berkeley Abstract: Computational imaging jointly designs hardware and algorithms to push beyond the classical limits of imaging, enabling measurement of new quantities (e.g. 3D, phase, and super-resolution) with simple, inexpensive hardware. These approaches have already transformed consumer photography; our goal is to achieve a similar transformation in scientific microscopy. In this […]

    Free
  • Zheng, Y. (CSE) – Extending eBPF Beyond Kernel Extensions: Verified Interfaces for Runtime System Extensibility

    Virtual Event

    Modern system software increasingly needs runtime extensibility: userspace applications need safe ways to expose domain-specific extension points, GPU resource management needs workload-specific memory and scheduling policies, and kernel eBPF JIT compilers need different runtime optimizations as workloads and hardware vary. However, built-in policies are safe but difficult to specialize across rapidly changing workloads and hardware […]

  • Panel Discussion—Let the City Speak: The Sonic Journey of Quetzal—Arts Dean’s Speaker Series

    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    Audiences are invited to Let the City Speak: The Sonic Journey of Quetzal—a conversation and panel discussion with filmmaker Akira Boch and Quetzal members Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores. Introduced by Interim Dean and Professor of Film and Digital Media Lawrence Andrews. Conversation and panel discussion with UCSC Professors Russell Rodriguez and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (4:00–6:00 […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • Your Next Degree: Graduate School

    Careers and academic interests often evolve over time, and many people choose to pursue graduate education after gaining experience in the workforce or further exploring their fields. Whether you are considering a master’s or PhD, in an academic or professional program, graduate school can be a powerful step toward advancing your goals, shifting career paths, […]

    Free
  • “So, There We Were…” – Celebrating the Untold Stories Behind the Discoveries

    Hay Barn 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, United States

    To celebrate another year of profound discoveries, uplifting unheard voices, and opening up the world for the next generation of students, the Academic Senate is planning a year-end celebratory event on Wednesday, May 27, 5-7:30 pm (week 9), at the Haybarn. But lest you think this is yet one more end-of-year academic event with mind-numbing […]

    Free
  • Build better chips

    Silicon Valley Campus 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, United States

    Verify faster. Build better chips. Semiconductor Design Info Session Explore the fast-paced world of semiconductor design and verification, and how advanced tools—including AI—are transforming the industry. At this info session, […]

  • Oh, S. (CSE) – Efficient Instruction Supply for Datacenter Processors

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA
    Hybrid Event

    Modern datacenter CPUs lose 25–66% of execution cycles to instruction-delivery stalls. This bottleneck persists, despite the recent trend towards accelerators and GPUs, as there is continuing demand by applications that only execute on CPUs. Two workload classes dominate today’s datacenter execution cycles: hyperscale server software (databases, build systems, and content stores), whose large instruction footprints […]

  • BME 280B Seminar: 4th Year Grad Talks

    Biomedical Sciences Building 575 McLaughlin Drive

    Please join us for our BME 280B seminar series Thursday (5/28/26) in person at Biomed 200. The event will run from 11:40 AM to 1:15 PM and feature our 4th year grad talks. 11:40AM – 11:50AM: Ivana Pacar 11:53AM – 12:03PM: Jesus Gonzalez Ferrer 12:06PM – 12:16PM: Connor Mattingly 12:19PM – 12:29PM: Samira Vera 12:32PM – 12:42PM: Nick Chu 12:45PM […]

  • Ortiz Barbosa, D. (CSE) – HARDENING AUTONOMOUS CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS AGAINST ADVERSARIAL CONDITIONS

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Autonomous systems, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and drones, are increasingly deployed across a wider array of contexts for both civilian and military use. As these systems become more common, they may be targeted by malicious actors seeking to exploit and abuse them, compromising safety-critical operations. Among the ways to protect these systems simulation based […]

  • Yang, D. (CSE) – Inner Monologue: a Pathway to Human-Like Reasoning for Complex Tasks

    Silicon Valley Campus 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, United States
    Hybrid Event

    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), […]

  • Educational Therapy Program Info Session

    Silicon Valley Campus 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, United States

    Transform learning Join Diana Black Kennedy, chair of UCSC Silicon Valley’s Educational Therapy certificate program, to learn how this distinctive program prepares educators and professionals to create meaningful, lasting impact. As one […]

  • Zhou, K. (CSE) – Toward Safer Frontier AI: From Evaluation and Red-Teaming to Alignment and Oversight

    Virtual Event

    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 […]

  • Qureshi, A. (ECE) – ISoC: A Universal Impedance Spectroscopy Instrument-on-Chip in SKY130 130 nm CMOS

    Virtual Event

    Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is the workhorse measurement behind lithium-ion battery diagnostics, biosensing, and corrosion science — yet no integrated circuit has ever delivered the complete capability of a benchtop analyzer on a single die. This dissertation presents ISoC, the first universal Impedance Spectroscopy instrument-on-chip. Designed in SkyWater 130 nm CMOS process, ISoC supports all […]

  • Insurance, Risk, and Resilience in a Changing World

    Virtual Event

    Climate change is reshaping every system it touches. This panel examines one that most people haven’t much considered in climate terms: insurance. When the industry built to share risk retreats from it, the consequences fall hardest on communities least able to absorb them. Three panelists examine what that failure looks like from the inside, where […]

    Free
  • BME80G Seminar – Katherine Bonini, “Rethinking Familial Risk in Genomic Medicine: Ethical Approaches to Cascade Screening”

    Jack Baskin Auditorium 191 Baskin Cir, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Katherine Bonini, Senior Genetic Counselor @ Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai   Description: It has long been argued that families are central to genomic medicine. Genomic risk, diagnosis, and management are rarely confined to a single individual, and separating patients’ interests from those of their relatives is often neither straightforward nor desirable. Despite this, […]

  • Zhu, R. (ECE) – From Neuromorphic Principles to Efficient Neural Language Architectures

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA
    Hybrid Event

    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 […]