Ph.D. Presentations

Name: Shen, J. (STAT) – Bayesian Modeling and Uncertainty Quantification for Verbal Autopsy Data
Start: 2026-09-01T09:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-09-01T11:00:00-07:00

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1 event 3 1 event, 3 Virtual Event 4:00 pm Le, A. (STAT) – Bayesian Nonparametric Analysis of Densities for Replicated Point Patterns Virtual Event August 3 @ 4:00 pm Le, A. (STAT) – Bayesian Nonparametric Analysis of Densities for Replicated Point Patterns 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 […]	0 events 4 0 events, 4	0 events 5 0 events, 5	0 events 6 0 events, 6	0 events 7 0 events, 7	0 events 8 0 events, 8	0 events 9 0 events, 9
1 event 10 1 event, 10 Hybrid Event 10:30 am Zhao, Z. (CSE) – TOWARD VERIFIABLE REASONING IN LLMS Hybrid Event August 10 @ 10:30 am Zhao, Z. (CSE) – TOWARD VERIFIABLE REASONING IN LLMS 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 […]	0 events 11 0 events, 11	0 events 12 0 events, 12	0 events 13 0 events, 13	2 events 14 2 events, 14 Hybrid Event 8:30 am Krishnaswamy, L. (CSE) – Network Load Balancing for Geographically Distributed Datacenters Hybrid Event August 14 @ 8:30 am Krishnaswamy, L. (CSE) – Network Load Balancing for Geographically Distributed Datacenters As datacenters scale up and become more geographically distributed, wide-area network inter-datacenter traffic, which typically consists of data-heavy tasks, has become increasingly prevalent. Some of the noteworthy challenges raised by the coexistence and interaction between inter- and intra-datacenter traffic are the differences in their QoS requirements, link utilization, and round-trip times. To the best of […], Virtual Event 2:15 pm Aliamooei Lakeh, S. (ECE) – Optimization and Decision-Support Frameworks for Resilient Power Systems Under Large-Scale Electrification Virtual Event August 14 @ 2:15 pm Aliamooei Lakeh, S. (ECE) – Optimization and Decision-Support Frameworks for Resilient Power Systems Under Large-Scale Electrification The rapid electrification of transportation is creating new interdependencies between power and transportation systems, particularly during extreme events and disasters. As electric vehicle (EV) adoption increases, evacuation-related charging demand, infrastructure disruptions, and limited access to energy resources introduce challenges that conventional power system planning and operation frameworks were not designed to address. Wildfires provide a […]	0 events 15 0 events, 15	0 events 16 0 events, 16
2 events 17 2 events, 17 Hybrid Event 10:00 am Nikolakakis, M. (ECE) – Learned Gridless Representations of Cone Beam Computed Tomography Scans Hybrid Event August 17 @ 10:00 am Nikolakakis, M. (ECE) – Learned Gridless Representations of Cone Beam Computed Tomography Scans Medical image representation has long been dominated by voxel-grid matrices. While their inherent structure and order work efficiently for various linear transformations and provide a seamless visualization method on monitors, they fail to preserve the topology of the scan and to encode sparse information in a memory-efficient way. The recent emergence of machine learning-based continuous coordinate-based […], 1:00 pm Condon, C. (BMEB) – Genomic conflict across scales August 17 @ 1:00 pm Condon, C. (BMEB) – Genomic conflict across scales Genomes are often viewed as cooperative systems in which genes work together to support organismal function. Yet genetic elements can also act in ways that favor their own transmission or persistence, creating conflict within the genome. In this talk, I examine the evolutionary and functional consequences of such genomic conflict across three systems. First, I […]	2 events 18 2 events, 18 Virtual Event 10:00 am Gutie, J. (SciCAM) – SORh: Hyperbolic Relaxation Methods For Elliptic Problems In Computational Fluid Dynamics Virtual Event August 18 @ 10:00 am Gutie, J. (SciCAM) – SORh: Hyperbolic Relaxation Methods For Elliptic Problems In Computational Fluid Dynamics This thesis explores iterative methods for solving elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), which are used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model a wide range of physical phenomena. The primary application of interest here is self-gravity, modeled by Poisson’s equation. Although many numerical approaches exist, including direct matrix inversion, FFT-based methods, and classical iterative methods […], Hybrid Event 2:00 pm Lupin-Jimenez, L. (AM) – Data-Driven Deep Learning for Turbulent Phenomena: Regional Ocean Prediction and Assimilation, Spectral Bias in Diffusion Models, and Equation Discovery Hybrid Event August 18 @ 2:00 pm Lupin-Jimenez, L. (AM) – Data-Driven Deep Learning for Turbulent Phenomena: Regional Ocean Prediction and Assimilation, Spectral Bias in Diffusion Models, and Equation Discovery Deep learning models trained on simulation and reanalysis data can now emulate turbulent geophysical flows at a small fraction of the computational cost of numerical solvers. Their scientific utility depends on physical consistency, which for the systems studied here rests in large part on spectral fidelity, the accurate reconstruction of variance across spatial scales. This […]	0 events 19 0 events, 19	1 event 20 1 event, 20 Hybrid Event 1:00 pm Penunuri, G. (BMEB) – Genomic, Proteomic, and Computational Approaches to the Study of Host-Microbe Systems Hybrid Event August 20 @ 1:00 pm Penunuri, G. (BMEB) – Genomic, Proteomic, and Computational Approaches to the Study of Host-Microbe Systems Host-microbe systems are core to some of biology’s most consequential interactions, from the pathogens that drive infectious disease to symbionts affecting agricultural pest control and vector-borne disease transmission. Yet unlike the model organisms that have driven most of modern molecular biology, the microbes at the center of these interactions are rarely genetically tractable: many cannot […]	1 event 21 1 event, 21 Virtual Event 3:00 pm Huang, X. (CSE) – Scalable and Verifiable Reasoning for Medical Foundation Models Virtual Event August 21 @ 3:00 pm Huang, X. (CSE) – Scalable and Verifiable Reasoning for Medical Foundation Models This PhD research focuses on developing reliable medical foundation models capable of reasoning across textual, visual, and interactive clinical information. The work investigates three complementary directions: improving medical reasoning through test-time scaling, training multimodal medical models with verifiable rewards, and synthesizing high-quality visual question-answering data from biomedical literature using generator-verifier frameworks. Building on these efforts, […]	0 events 22 0 events, 22	0 events 23 0 events, 23
1 event 24 1 event, 24 Virtual Event 2:00 pm Pawar, M. (CSE) – Understanding Representations, Reasoning, and Decision-Making in Autonomous Driving Models Virtual Event August 24 @ 2:00 pm Pawar, M. (CSE) – Understanding Representations, Reasoning, and Decision-Making in Autonomous Driving Models Modern autonomous-driving models increasingly rely on learned representations and generated reasoning to interpret complex scenes and produce predictions or actions. However, it remains unclear what information these models encode, how that information is exposed through common interpretation methods, and whether their stated reasoning meaningfully influences their behavior. This research investigates these questions across motion-forecasting and […]	1 event 25 1 event, 25 Hybrid Event 11:00 am Gomez, J. (CSE) – Toward Sustainable and Secure Open Source Software: Discovery, Measurement, and Defense Hybrid Event August 25 @ 11:00 am Gomez, J. (CSE) – Toward Sustainable and Secure Open Source Software: Discovery, Measurement, and Defense In March 2024, a backdoor was discovered in xz Utils, a widely used open source data compression library present in nearly every major Linux distribution. The attack was discovered days before merging into major distributions, and if this had happened, it would have allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on millions of systems worldwide via […]	0 events 26 0 events, 26	1 event 27 1 event, 27 Hybrid Event 3:00 pm Kramer, A. (BMEB) – Scalable phylo-pangenomics Hybrid Event August 27 @ 3:00 pm Kramer, A. (BMEB) – Scalable phylo-pangenomics The COVID-19 pandemic generated genomic data at unprecedented scale, with tens of millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes deposited in public repositories and thousands of new sequences added each day. This dissertation develops methods for analyzing genomic datasets at this scale, unified by the idea that encoding genomes according to their evolutionary relationships can make otherwise intractable […]	2 events 28 2 events, 28 Hybrid Event 9:00 am Saleem, O. (ECE) – Coupled Evacuation Readiness and Post-Disaster Restoration for Vehicle-to-Grid Enabled Resilient Power–Transportation Networks Hybrid Event August 28 @ 9:00 am Saleem, O. (ECE) – Coupled Evacuation Readiness and Post-Disaster Restoration for Vehicle-to-Grid Enabled Resilient Power–Transportation Networks The accelerating adoption of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) in California is reshaping both the transportation and electrical grids at the moment as climate-driven disasters are intensifying in frequency and severity. This dual transition exposes a critical structural gap: existing resilience research treats pre-disaster evacuation readiness and post-disaster grid restoration as separate problems, even though both are […], Hybrid Event 10:00 am Nag, S. (BMEB) – Personalized Diploid Genome Graphs for Accurate Somatic Variant Discovery Hybrid Event August 28 @ 10:00 am Nag, S. (BMEB) – Personalized Diploid Genome Graphs for Accurate Somatic Variant Discovery Many somatic variant-calling pipelines begin by aligning tumor and matched-normal sequencing reads to a single linear reference genome, such as GRCh38. Because every individual differs substantially from this reference, this approach can introduce reference bias, causing reads to map incorrectly or not at all and potentially leading to missed somatic variants or germline variants being […]	0 events 29 0 events, 29	0 events 30 0 events, 30
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