• Designing for Today’s Digital World

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

    Design digital experiences people love to use. In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, organizations need professionals who can combine empathy, usability, and aesthetics to create interfaces that engage and delight users. Learn how UX and web design specialists use research‑driven methods, prototyping tools, and inclusive design principles to build seamless digital experiences across platforms. Speaker […]

  • BME/Genomics Seminar: Supervised and Unsupervised DeepGene Finding and Genome Foundation Models

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

    Presenter: Mario Stanke, Professor of Bioinformatics, University of Greifswald Description: This talk will explore recent machine learning approaches for eukaryotic genome annotation. Our supervised ab initio deep gene finder, Tiberius, correctly predicts more than four times as many human protein-coding gene structures as its father, Augustus, and in some clades, it approaches the accuracy of […]

  • Burbano, L. (CS) – Security of autonomous decision-making agents: From control systems to embodied AI

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

    Due to their increasing complexity, autonomous decision-making agents rely on increasingly advanced algorithms, from classical control theory to reinforcement learning (RL) and, more recently, large vision-language models. While these algorithms help automate the decision-making in complex systems, they bring newer attack vulnerabilities that an adversary can exploit. In this dissertation, we study the security of […]

  • UC Santa Cruz Premed Cohorts and DIY Info Session

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

    Join the UC Santa Cruz Premed Postbacc Program for an informative, live online session designed for students, parents, and anyone exploring pathways into medicine, public health, and other health professions. In this discussion, we’ll provide a comprehensive overview of premed and pre-health programs to help you understand your options and choose the path that best aligns with […]

  • From Diploma to Dollars: Money Matters for New Alumni

    Life After Graduation Series Hosted by UC Davis, open to recent alumni and rising seniors of all UC campuses. Join the Cal Aggie Alumni Association for another session in the Life After Graduation Series, “From Diploma to Dollars: Money Matters for New Alumni,” on Tuesday, June 30 at 12:00 p.m. (Pacific Time). Graduation is behind you—now it’s […]

    Free
  • Levine, R. (CSE) – Validating GPU Memory Consistency and Safety at Scale

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

    Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become essential platforms for parallel computing, supporting applications far beyond graphics. Central to GPU programming models is its memory consistency specification (MCS), which defines the semantics of concurrent shared-memory operations and interacts with other language features to determine security guarantees such as memory safety. Understanding whether implementations conform to an […]

  • Scott, J. (CSE) – Mechanistic Specialization Does Not Guarantee Performance: Evidence from Dual AttentionTransformers

    Virtual Event

    Dual Attention Transformers (DATs) extend decoder-only Transformers with a dedicated relational-attention stream, making them a natural architecture for abstract identity rules such asABA and ABB. Surprisingly, we find that comparably sized GPT-2 models outperform DATs on these tasks. We investigate this gap with two complementary mechanistic analyses. First, causal mediation analysis shows that DATs exhibit […]

  • July Slugs and Steins with Assistant Professor Aide Macias-Munoz

    Virtual Event

    Unlocking the blueprint for regeneration: Insights from Hydra Regeneration, the ability to heal and regrow lost body parts, varies across species, tissues, and even cell types. To harness regenerative ability for […]

  • Holmes, J. (CM) – Towards a Multi-dimensional Model of User Load

    Virtual Event

    Games user researchers (GURs) use various methods to understand when a game is overloading its players. In games research where data-driven multimodal approaches are necessary to drive insights, the currently available tools to measure user load are coarse, one-dimensional, and often aggregated. The more dominant instruments, such as the Cognitive Load Scale (CLS) and the […]

  • How to Apply to the Premed Postbacc Program

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

    Join UC Santa Cruz Healthcare Pathways for a live online information session to learn about our Premed Postbacc Cohort, Premed and Pre-Health DIY Pathways, and other program offerings. We’ll provide an overview of our programs and cover how to apply for our next admissions cycle, which opens in August. We’ll also discuss the application process, admissions timeline, coursework, […]

  • Gholami, K. (ECE) – Efficient Language Model Construction and Inference via Sparsity

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

    While large language models can match or exceed human performance, they do so with memory and energy costs orders of magnitude greater than biological cognition. We investigate sparsity as a brain-inspired computational principle to address both. We first establish a framework for evaluating small language model construction methods, using the next-token logit distribution as a […]

  • Fontana, J. (STAT) – When We’re Always Wrong: Scalable Variable Selection in M-Open Settings

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

    A ubiquitous task in statistical practice is that of variable selection, identifying which of a large set of features are the relevant ones. As data sets with a large number of observations have become increasingly common, new theoretical and computational challenges for model selection have emerged. We consider the variable selection problem for linear models […]

  • The Dickens Universe featuring ‘Bleak House’

    Humanities and Social Sciences Facility 2 Hagar Drive, Santa Cruz, CA

    The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity—all focused on Victorian literature. In 2026, the Dickens Universe will feature ‘Bleak House’ by Charles Dickens.

    $500 – $1950