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  • Three silhouetted figures talking, overlaid with graphics of digital data, charts, and technology interfaces.

    Calicchio, A. (BMEB) – Comparison of long-read sequencing and analysis methods for transcriptome analysis

    Biomedical Sciences Building 575 McLaughlin Drive
    Hybrid Event

    Alternative splicing, the process generating different RNA isoforms from a single gene, is considered one of the main factors driving increased organism complexity in eukaryotes. Variations in isoform and gene expression produce the functional differences that give rise to different cell types and, in some cases, result in disease. Long-read RNA sequencing has transformed our […]

  • Abstract digital illustration featuring gears and interconnected technology elements.

    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 […]

  • Abstract digital illustration featuring gears and interconnected technology elements.

    Chen, X. (STAT) – Changepoint Detection and Clustering Methods for Multivariate Time Series and Attributed Networks

    Virtual Event

    Time series data with dependence arise across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, often presenting challenging inferential problems related to structural change and clustering. This Ph.D. proposal addresses several related problems in statistical inference for multivariate and network-indexed time series. First, we develop a weighted multivariate $U$-statistic procedure for detecting a single changepoint […]

  • Three silhouetted figures talking, overlaid with graphics of digital data, charts, and technology interfaces.

    Li, J. (CM) – Detecting Failure to Adapt: Reading Self-Regulated Learning Breakdowns from Game Telemetry through Plan Recognition

    Virtual Event

    Three learners who fail the same level of an educational game the same number of times can be failing in three different ways, and the difference determines what each should do next. Yet the measures a game’s logs are usually reduced to (completion time, error counts, mastery estimates) render the three identical. This proposal takes […]

  • Close-up abstract image of a circuit board with glowing lines and interconnected pathways.

    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 […]

  • Abstract digital illustration featuring gears and interconnected technology elements.

    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 […]

  • Three silhouetted figures talking, overlaid with graphics of digital data, charts, and technology interfaces.

    Le, A. (STAT) – Bayesian Nonparametric Analysis of Densities for Replicated Point Patterns

    Virtual Event

    Many scientific applications produce repeated point pattern realizations across subjects, regions, or time. While such point patterns exhibit individual variation, we assume they arise from related point processes that share a common distributional structure. This dissertation develops a Bayesian nonparametric modeling framework built around an interpretable baseline. We work with Poisson processes, such that the […]

  • Abstract digital illustration featuring gears and interconnected technology elements.

    Zhao, Z. (CSE) – TOWARD VERIFIABLE REASONING IN LLMS

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

    Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can improve final-answer performance, but it does not guarantee that intermediate reasoning steps are faithful, valid, or checkable. This proposal studies how formal methods can make natural-language reasoning more reliable by translating CoT rationales into Lean artifacts, checking the resulting theorem statements and proofs, and using compiler feedback to diagnose and repair […]