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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260521T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260521T143000
DTSTAMP:20260326T204610Z
CREATED:20260326T204610Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260326T204610Z
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SUMMARY:Annual BE Student Project Showcase
DESCRIPTION:Join Baskin Engineering for our annual Student Project Showcase to celebrate the innovative work and accomplishments of undergraduate engineers in capstone courses and research pathways. The broader campus community\, parents\, and industry partners are invited to view the culmination of student work. \nThe day begins with oral presentations from nominated “best-in-class” teams and those working on industry-sponsored projects. Following this\, all students will participate in a comprehensive Poster Session featuring project outcomes with some teams including table-top demonstrations of functional hardware. \nEvent Details: \n\nDate: May 21\, 2026\nOral Presentations (Nominated/Industry Teams): 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM\, Engineering 2\, Room 180\nPoster Session (All Student Teams): 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM\, Engineering Courtyard
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/be-student-project-showcase-2026/
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Undergraduate
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T121500
DTSTAMP:20260518T155149Z
CREATED:20260518T155149Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260518T155149Z
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SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - Safety Alignment of LMs via Non-cooperative Games
DESCRIPTION:Presenter: Arman Zharmagambetov\, Meta \nAbstract:\nEnsuring the safety of language models (LMs) while maintaining their usefulness remains a critical challenge in AI alignment. Current approaches rely on sequential adversarial training: generating adversarial (harmful) prompts and fine-tuning LMs to defend against them. We introduce a different paradigm: framing safety alignment as a non-zero-sum game between an Attacker LM and a Defender LM trained jointly via online reinforcement learning. Each LM continuously adapts to the other’s evolving strategies\, driving iterative improvement. Our method uses a preference-based reward signal derived from pairwise comparisons instead of point-wise scores\, providing more robust supervision and potentially reducing reward hacking. Our RL recipe\, AdvGame\, shifts the Pareto frontier of safety and utility\, yielding a Defender LM that is simultaneously more helpful and more resilient to adversarial attacks. In addition\, the resulting Attacker LM converges into a strong\, general-purpose red-teaming agent that can be directly deployed to probe arbitrary target models. \nBio:\nArman Zharmagambetov is a research scientist in the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team at Meta. His research primarily focuses on machine learning and optimization\, recently exploring their application in enhancing the security and robustness of AI systems. He received his PhD from the University of California – Merced. Afterward\, he completed his postdoctoral research at FAIR\, focusing on Reinforcement Learning\, AI-guided design and Optimization. \nHosted by: Professor Alvaro Cardenas and Professor Sungjin Im \nDate and Time: Wednesday\, May 20\, 2026 from 11:00 am – 12:15 pm \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit\, pastries\, coffee\, and tea will be provided.) \nZoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-safety-alignment-of-lms-via-non-cooperative-games/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260519T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260519T120000
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SUMMARY:Paul Pena\, D. (CSE) - Efficient Pattern Counting in Sparse Graphs and Hypergraphs
DESCRIPTION: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 large\, we are interested in finding efficient algorithms\, that is\, algorithms that run in linear or subquadratic time with respect to the size of the input. \nFinding such algorithms in general (when G can be any graph) is not possible. Instead\, we restrict our input to sparse classes of graphs. One family of graph classes that has been widely studied in the context of subgraph and homomorphism counting is bounded-degeneracy graph classes. Real-world graphs in many domains have bounded degeneracy\, so studying these classes in theory can lead to practical algorithms. \nA series of advances in the study of homomorphism counting led to a dichotomy theorem that exactly characterized which patterns were linear-time computable for bounded-degeneracy inputs. This dissertation builds on this result\, extending it to other variants of this problem\, and generalizing it to other different settings\, like counting hypergraphs and notions of sparsity beyond degeneracy. \nOur results help develop the theory of subgraph counting in sparse graphs and hypergraphs\, and showcase how sparsity can be used both in theory and practice to develop faster algorithms. \n  \nEvent Host: Daniel Paul Pena\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science & Engineering  \nAdvisor: C. Sheshadhri \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97685906168?pwd=O35brsWilyn2m8AgMn0dKgALBe6wi1.1
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/paul-pena-d-cse-efficient-pattern-counting-in-sparse-graphs-and-hypergraphs/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260515T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260516T180000
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SUMMARY:NemoClaw NVIDIA x ASUS Hackathon @ UC Santa Cruz
DESCRIPTION:Welcome to the premier physical AI hackathon on the West Coast. We are bringing together the top 200 AI\, infrastructure\, and hardware engineers to build autonomous\, agentic applications on the NVIDIA NemoClaw stack. \n​You aren’t just calling APIs\, you are building on enterprise-grade hardware. \n​The Tracks: \n\nThe Edge Track: 40 exclusive teams will be granted physical\, on-site access to an ASUS DGX Spark unit to build and deploy locally.\n​The Cloud Track: Teams will build the exact same stack utilizing fully sponsored cloud compute instances via Brev.dev.\n\n​The Arsenal & Prizes: Every team builds on a unified playing field. The top projects will take home heavy enterprise hardware\, including: \n\n​NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos\n​The ASUS Ascent (DGX Spark)\n​Jensen Huang signed NVIDIA hats & premium swag\n​High-value Brev.dev compute credits\n​Monitors\n​Internship Opportunities\n\n​The Details: \n\n​Who: Open to the top engineers at UC Santa Cruz and local feeder universities.\n​Food: Fully catered for 24 hours. Energy\, caffeine\, and meals are on us.\n​Special Guests*: Opening and closing ceremonies featuring VIP industry leaders (to be announced).\n​Title Sponsors: Nvidia\, ASUS\, Baskin School of Engineering\n\nRegister today!  \n​Space is strictly capped at 200 builders. Registration requires application approval. \n*May subject to change \n 
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/nvidia-hackathon-2026/
LOCATION:Kresge College\, R-3 Suites\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Competition,Meetings & Conferences
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260515T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260515T160000
DTSTAMP:20260429T224549Z
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SUMMARY:STEM Culture Festival
DESCRIPTION:The STEM Culture Festival is returning to UC Santa Cruz on Friday\, May 15 from 1-4pm in the Baskin Engineering Courtyard. Join us! \nThis year\, we’re expanding with even more performances\, activities\, and creative ways to celebrate UCSC’s vibrant\, diverse\, and excellent STEM culture!  \nWhat to expect: \n\nCuban Dance Master Susana Arenas and her troupe of Orisha dancers led by Cuban Drum Master Toribio Garcia return for a rousing\, communal dance\n\nStudent performers: Los Mejicas and their traditional baile folklórico followed by an open dance lesson/performance by Slug N’ Boots\n\nSTEM-themed drag performances and spoken word poetry by student creatives \n\nAssociate Vice Chancellor for Student Success and Equity Dr. Ebonee Williams (Chemical Engineering\, University of Washington ‘04) will share an inspirational talk on “Bringing our whole selves to STEM!”\n\nEl Buen Taco and Falafel Santa Cruz will be serving delicious food\, completely FREE for all attendees who engage with the student orgs and their activities\n\nMore than just your standard student organization tabling: Games\, interactive demos\, culturally themed activities\, and opportunities to learn more about clubs from all over campus \n\nRaffle for gift cards to be awarded every hour from 1-4pm – must be present to win! \n\nThis event will take place in the Baskin Engineering Courtyard and will be open to all UCSC students\, staff\, and faculty. \nThe STEM Culture Festival celebrates and elevates the many backgrounds\, cultures\, and identities that intersect with our work as scientists\, engineers\, educators\, and members of the UCSC community. It is a rare opportunity when all of UCSC is invited to meet at the engineering school for a time of joy and togetherness. We enthusiastically invite you to attend and be in community with us – especially now in these tumultuous times of division and disunity.  \nThis event represents a collaboration between Baskin Engineering\, the Women’s Center\, the Lionel Cantú Queer Resource Center\, El Centro Latinx and Chicanx Resource Center\, the Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center\, the Physical and Biological Sciences Division\, and the Genomics Institute.
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/stem-culture-festival-2026/
LOCATION:Jack Baskin Engineering\, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Concerts,Performances,Social Gathering,Undergraduate
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260514T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260514T190000
DTSTAMP:20260422T164712Z
CREATED:20260420T170937Z
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SUMMARY:QB3/QBI Pre-Hackathon Mixer
DESCRIPTION:Join us for an exciting pre-hackathon mixer at University of California\, Santa Cruz! Get ready to mingle\, form teams\, and start brainstorming ideas for your projects before the QBI Hackathon kicks off at UCSF in June 2026. \nAgenda\n5:00 PM – Doors Open\n5:30 PM – Pitch Session\n6:00 PM – Networking & Mingling \nWe can’t wait to see the ideas and projects that will be presented at the mixer. Whether you’re presenting or simply attending to learn more and meet potential teammates\, this event is an excellent opportunity to start building connections within our vibrant community of participants. \nDon’t miss out on this chance to get inspired and kickstart your hackathon experience. To attend\, please RSVP  – https://qbi.ucsf.edu/events/hackathon-mixer-ucsc-2026 \nThe QBI hackathon is a 48-hour event connecting the developer community in the Bay Area with the scientists from the three QB3 campuses (UCSF\, UCB and UCSC)\, during which we work together on cutting edge biomedical problems. One of the highlights of our pre-hackathon mixer is the opportunity for participants to showcase their ideas\, projects\, or concepts to the group.
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/qb3-qbi-pre-hackathon-mixer/
LOCATION:Rachel Carson College\, 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Meetings & Conferences,Reception
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260514T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260514T110000
DTSTAMP:20260427T162920Z
CREATED:20260427T162713Z
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SUMMARY:Shadmon\, R. (CS) - Proximal Byzantine Agreement
DESCRIPTION:Research on fault-tolerance protocols for approximate Byzantine agreement\n(ABA) has largely focused on ensuring that distributed processes remain\nconsistent despite fewer than 1/3 faulty processes. Yet in many\nreal systems\, consistency is only useful when it enables processes to\nmake accurate decisions from replicated\, noisy\, and potentially\nadversarially corrupted data relative to an ideal fault-free baseline.\nThis limitation is increasingly important in edge applications such as\nautonomous vehicles\, drone networks\, smart cities\, manufacturing\, and\nsensor-based systems\, where agreement directly drives downstream\nactions. At the same time\, many existing ABA protocols impose\nimpractical requirements\, such as replica counts that grow with data\ndimensionality or prior knowledge of the maximum distance between values\nproposed by each process. \nWe introduce Stochastic Byzantine Agreement (SBA)\, a new problem\nformulation in which the goal is to estimate an output from n replicated\nvalues consisting of n-f nonfaulty outputs generated by an\nunderlying stochastic process and f arbitrarily chosen\nByzantine outputs. We then present Proximal Byzantine Agreement\n(PBA)\, a stochastic agreement protocol that solves SBA by enabling\nconsumers to infer the most likely ideal output conditioned on the\noutputs they receive. In addition\, PBA provides a region\nguarantee that\, as we prove\, always contains the corresponding\nfault-free stochastic estimate of the true value. \nWe describe the design of PBA\, formalize its guarantees\, and evaluate\nits accuracy against existing techniques using stochastic simulations\nacross symmetric and asymmetric distributions and multiple system\nconfigurations. We also evaluate runtime overhead and performance in a\nfollow-the-leader drone network simulator and in a Java implementation on\nRaspberry Pis using a real-world adaptive cruise control dataset. Our\nresults show that PBA performs competitively across all evaluated\nsettings and especially well under simulated Byzantine attack. Most\nnotably\, PBA maintains stable accuracy as dimensionality increases\,\noutperforming methods that require up to 10x more replicas}\nand incur up to 10x greater computation time per agreement\ndecision. \nEvent Host: Roy Shadmon\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science  \nAdvisor: Owen Arden \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98390167664?pwd=DwkNuUSRaZRKXYb7pQbDYXgf7HFFPg.1 \nPasscode: pba
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/shadmon-r-cs-proximal-byzantine-agreement/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T170000
DTSTAMP:20260501T203636Z
CREATED:20260501T203636Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260501T203636Z
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SUMMARY:Zheng\, K. (CSE) - Towards Generalist Embodied World Models: From Neuro-Symbolic Interaction to Self-Evolving 3D World Generation
DESCRIPTION:Artificial intelligence is moving beyond passive perception toward systems that can understand\, interact with\, and generate the world. This dissertation studies generalist embodied world models that connect language\, vision\, action\, and 3D scene representations. It explores how multimodal systems can ground human instructions in physical environments\, reason over long-horizon tasks\, generate coherent text-and-visual content\, and construct spatially consistent 3D worlds from limited observations. Across embodied reasoning\, multimodal generation\, and 3D world construction\, this dissertation develops methods that combine pretrained models with structured interfaces such as symbolic reasoning\, generative visual tokens\, spatial priors\, and iterative self-refinement. These approaches aim to improve generalization\, data efficiency\, interpretability\, and geometric consistency without relying solely on monolithic end-to-end training. Together\, the work argues for a broader view of embodied AI: intelligent systems should not only recognize or describe the world\, but also act within it\, imagine it\, and build reusable representations of it. \nEvent Host: Kaizhi Zheng\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science & Engineering  \nAdvisor: Xin Eric Wang \n  \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/91912825272?pwd=aps1YHcJKMaqmhtgl72f51K9EbxrHt.1 \nPasscode: 991132
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/zheng-k-cse-towards-generalist-embodied-world-models-from-neuro-symbolic-interaction-to-self-evolving-3d-world-generation/
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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LOCATION:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T121500
DTSTAMP:20260330T203417Z
CREATED:20260330T203158Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260330T203417Z
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SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - The EU’s Cybersecurity Framework: what it is\, what it means
DESCRIPTION:Presenter: Chris Jay Hoofnagle\, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius\, Lothar Determann\, Pieter T.J. Wolters \nAbstract: \nThe European Union has enacted a comprehensive cybersecurity framework (the “Framework”) that imposes far-reaching obligations on developers of standalone software and connected products. This Article describes the European legislative approach before turning to a description of the Framework. Anchored by the Cyber Resilience Act and the Cybersecurity Act\, and reinforced by a constellation of sector-specific measures\, the Framework effectively creates a California-like-products-liability regime for software. It mandates extensive security-by-design obligations\, imposes stringent conformity assessment and incident-reporting duties\, and shifts substantial compliance burdens onto manufacturers\, importers\, and distributors. It even treats emotional wrongs caused by software as injurious. The Framework will take full effect in December 2027\, meaning that companies must integrate its requirements into their current product cycles. \nBio: Chris Hoofnagle is professor of law in residence at the University of California\, Berkeley\, where he teaches tort law and cybersecurity. \nHosted by: Professor Alvaro Cardenas \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit\, pastries\, coffee\, and tea will be provided.) \nZoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-the-eus-cybersecurity-framework-what-it-is-what-it-means/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260512T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260512T120000
DTSTAMP:20260421T160759Z
CREATED:20260421T160759Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260421T160759Z
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SUMMARY:Chen\, Q. (CSE) - New Approximation and Online Algorithms using Novel Combinatorial Structures
DESCRIPTION:Most optimization problems face the challenge of computing an optimum solution requiring superpolynomial time. In particular\, they are classified as NP-hard problems that have no polynomial-time algorithm to date. Instead\, computer scientists turn to find an approximate solution and create numerous elegant algorithms. However\, in the modern era\, computational environments have changed drastically\, and we are not able to afford to design new algorithms for each new problem via repeated trial and error. Therefore\, systematic ways to understand the possibilities and limitations of these problems are desired. This dissertation studies several central combinatorial optimization problems\, focusing on understanding the key structural obstacles and developing unified frameworks. Mainly\, we study two types of combinatorial optimization problems:\n(1) Scheduling. The problem is associated with limited resources\, and our target is to find an allocation method to complete all jobs over time that minimizes the overall budget cost.\n(2) Network Design. Different from scheduling problems. In this problem\, we aim to find a minimum-cost topological network that supports routing for demanding communications. \nOur first work is focused on a group-to-group survivable network design problem that generalizes the classic point-to-point network to support routing between any pair of subsets of nodes. Previous research stops at limited faults\, and the difficulty comes from the way to compress the graph into a tree. We propose a new framework via capacitated tree embeddings against arbitrary faults in the network\, which gives the first polylogarithmic approximation algorithm. Further\, this framework captures nearly all the recent models proposed in the area. \nIn contrast to the offline optimization problems mentioned above\, online algorithms are natural adaptations that have been found in tremendous real applications. In online algorithms\, the algorithm wants to compete against arbitrary uncertainty\, which means the instance is unknown at first and revealed over time. We study various scheduling problems and focus on some important metrics – average flow time\, which measures the average time a job stays in the system from its arrival to completion. Real-world demands give online scheduling problems enormously different settings. Computer scientists need to repeat errors and trials to find a provably good solution. We find the key required combinatorial property is supermodularity for the residual objective\, which measures the average completion time for all alive jobs assuming they have the same arrival time. Further\, we relate supermodularity with gross-substitute/linear-substitute (GS/LS)\, which is a well-studied definition in economics. Finally\, we propose a meta-algorithm that solves all captured problems in one shot. In the end\, we revisit the proportional fairness (PF) algorithm for $L_p$-norms of flow time. By reinterpreting the previous potential function and the corresponding Fisher market\, we show that PF is competitive. \n  \nEvent Host: Qingyun Chen\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science & Engineering  \nAdvisor: Sungjin Im \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/92628493495?pwd=iJq8YwarrYyofPLF4AmZpwzsZnLyvt.1 \n 
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/chen-q-cse-new-approximation-and-online-algorithms-using-novel-combinatorial-structures-2/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260506T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260506T121500
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LAST-MODIFIED:20260505T154459Z
UID:10014548-1778065200-1778069700@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - The Wallenberg AI\, Autonomous Systems and Software Program
DESCRIPTION:Presenters: Prof. Karl-Erik Arzen (Co-Director of WASP and Lund University)\, Dr. Paul Townend (WASP Graduate School management and Umeå University)\, and Carl Magnus Bruhner (Linkoping University) \nAbstract: The Wallenberg AI\, Autonomous Systems\, and Software Program (WASP) is the largest research initiative in Swedish history\, with a budget of over $700M and a research focus AI and autonomous systems acting in collaboration with humans. The program funds over 500 current PhD students\, has recruited over 70 international faculty\, engages with over 80 companies and organizations\, and has formal agreements with academic organizations including Stanford\, UC Berkeley\, MIT\, Caltech\, ETH Zurich\, and Imperial College London. \nAs part of its internationalization efforts\, WASP has organized a visit to the Bay Area for 13 PhD students and 2 faculty – all of whom specialize in Cloud and AI systems and software. Topics studied by the students include modeling and predicting network dynamics\, verification and accountability in agentic AI systems\, using underwater robotic systems to inspect and maintain subsea data infrastructures\, compliance engineering with the EU AI act\, runtime requirements conflict management in AI-driven autonomous systems\, and cloud-native traffic management for mobile networks. \nBio: The talk will be led by Prof. Karl-Erik Arzen (Co-Director of WASP and Lund University)\, Dr. Paul Townend (WASP Graduate School management and Umeå University)\, and Carl Magnus Bruhner (Linkoping University). We will present the program in detail\, and discuss potential opportunities for collaboration and future research visits from our students. More information on WASP can be found at: https://wasp-sweden.org \nHosted by: Professor Alvaro Cardenas \nDate and Time: Wednesday\, May 6 from 11:00 am – 12:15 pm \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit\, pastries\, coffee\, and tea will be provided.) \nZoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-the-wallenberg-ai-autonomous-systems-and-software-program/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260429T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260429T121500
DTSTAMP:20260402T185047Z
CREATED:20260402T185047Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260402T185047Z
UID:10011848-1777460400-1777464900@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - Towards Safe and Resilient Large-scale Distributed Programming
DESCRIPTION:Presenter: Philipp Haller\, KTH Royal Institute of Technology \nAbstract: \nDistributed programming is notoriously difficult. Not only are distributed systems concurrent\, they pose additional challenges including data consistency and fault tolerance. At the same time\, the share of software systems that are necessarily distributed systems is growing rapidly. As a result\, too many software developers are asked to become distributed systems experts. Thus\, tools and techniques for ensuring the correctness of distributed systems are urgently needed in order to leave this unsustainable trajectory. This talk presents research results towards the design and implementation of programming systems that support emerging applications and workloads; provide reliability and trust; and embrace simplicity and accessibility. Concretely\, the presented work focuses on two directions. \nThe first direction explores a distributed programming model that provides consistency while enabling high availability for workloads operating on join-semilattices without sacrificing partition tolerance. We propose a new consistency protocol\, called observable atomic consistency protocol (OACP)\, which leverages on-demand coordination to support both coordination-free operations as well as totally-ordered operations on replicated data types. We present a formal\, mechanized model of OACP in rewriting logic and verify key correctness properties using the model checking tool Maude. Furthermore\, we present the evaluation of a prototype implementation of OACP based on Akka\, a widely-used actor-based middleware. The second direction explores a programming system that aims to reconcile the scalability and fault tolerance of stream processing systems with the flexibility of the actor concurrency model. The programming system ensures a failure-transparency property\, effectively masking failures through transparent recovery. Our work is the first to formalize failure transparency using a small-step operational semantics\, and to provide proofs of failure transparency for stateful dataflow streaming and a fault-tolerant actor-based programming model. \nBio: \nPhilipp Haller is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm\, Sweden. His main research interests are in the design and implementation of programming languages\, type systems\, concurrency\, and distributed programming. He was part of the team that received the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for the development of the Scala programming language. Prior to KTH\, he was an early employee at Akka (previously Lightbend\, Inc.)\, a start-up company developing and supporting Scala as well as frameworks for large-scale distributed programming. Prior to Akka\, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University\, USA\, and at EPFL\, Switzerland. In 2010 he received his PhD in computer science from EPFL\, including a nomination for the 2010 EPFL Doctorate Award. In 2006 he received his Dipl.-Inform. degree from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (previously University of Karlsruhe)\, Germany. \nHosted by: Professor Mohsen Lesani \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit\, pastries\, coffee\, and tea will be provided.) \nZoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-towards-safe-and-resilient-large-scale-distributed-programming/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260427T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260427T130000
DTSTAMP:20260423T210320Z
CREATED:20260420T225301Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260423T210320Z
UID:10012119-1777287600-1777294800@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Quality First Coding Contest
DESCRIPTION:This is a programming contest\, but with a twist! Instead of scoring you based on your speed and solution accuracy\, we score you based on your programming quality and solution accuracy. This means that instead of looking at how fast you can program a solution\, we look at your number of compiles/runs instead.* The contestant that uses the least number of compiles/runs to produce passing code is the winner. Ties are broken by time. \nFood will be provided. QFCC 20260427 – Poster
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/quality-first-coding-contest/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Quality-First-Coding-Contest.png
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T193000
DTSTAMP:20260402T222539Z
CREATED:20260402T213440Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260402T222539Z
UID:10012030-1776967200-1776972600@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Climate Week Tech Connect: Energy Solutions
DESCRIPTION:Join Baskin Engineering to explore the frontier of power engineering\, where the rapid rise of electrification and digital infrastructure is creating an unprecedented demand for next-generation talent and a critical opportunity for sustainability.  \nThis networking event bridges the gap between the classroom and the field\, offering students and faculty a front-row seat to the trends and high-impact career opportunities shaping our energy future. The event is part of Baskin Engineering Climate Week\, focused on raising awareness of climate issues and sustainability research and teaching. \nWhere: BE Courtyard\nWhen: Thursday\, April 23\, 6:00-7:30 p.m. \nWe hope to see you there!
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/climate-week-tech-connect-energy-solutions/
LOCATION:Jack Baskin Engineering\, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Meetings & Conferences
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X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street Santa Cruz CA 95064;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street:geo:-122.0632371,37.000369
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T181500
DTSTAMP:20260402T212222Z
CREATED:20260402T211703Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260402T212222Z
UID:10011935-1776963600-1776968100@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Careers in Climate Tech & Sustainability
DESCRIPTION:Ready to explore career pathways that matter? \nAttend our very special Careers in Climate Tech & Sustainability Panel—celebrating Baskin Engineering Climate Week—for an inside look at careers that will help build a sustainable future. Panelists representing different roles and organizations will share their career journeys and offer practical insights into working in climate tech. There will also be a catered networking reception that follows—don’t miss it! \nGet informed\, inspired\, and discover your path to a career in sustainability! \nThis event is part of Baskin Engineering’s Climate Tech Day featuring a community fair where students\, faculty\, climate and sustainability tech companies\, and community organizations will showcase their works through demonstrations\, poster presentations\, tabling\, and more.  \nWhere: E2-180\nWhen: Thursday\, April 23\, 5:00-6:15 p.m. \nRegister via Handshake. \nIf you have disability-related needs\, please contact the Career Success office at csuccess@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-4420 as soon as possible. \nYOU BELONG HERE\nPrograms and services are open to all\, consistent with state and federal law\, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service\, faculty program\, or community event—is designed to be accessible\, inclusive\, and respectful of all identities. To learn more\, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/careers-in-climate-tech-sustainability/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Javier-drone.png
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T170000
DTSTAMP:20260403T220700Z
CREATED:20260403T215527Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260403T220700Z
UID:10012043-1776952800-1776963600@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Climate Tech & Sustainability Showcase
DESCRIPTION:Join us for a Climate Tech & Sustainability Showcase\, where students\, faculty\, climate and sustainability-focused companies\, founders\, and community organizations come together to share their work and ideas. The event is part of Baskin Engineering Climate Week\, focused on raising awareness of climate issues and sustainability research and teaching. \nExplore a range of interactive demos\, poster presentations\, and tabling displays highlighting innovative research\, emerging technologies\, and real-world solutions to climate challenges. Baskin Engineering student organizations will also be on hand to share their climate friendly projects! \nCome network\, promote your organization\, and meet up-and-coming talent alongside other passionate\, like-minded members of the climate and sustainability community. \nWhere: BE Courtyard\nWhen: 2:00-5:00 p.m.
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/climate-tech-sustainability-showcase/
LOCATION:Jack Baskin Engineering\, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/4-23-25-climate-week-cl-002-scaled.jpg
GEO:37.000369;-122.0632371
X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street Santa Cruz CA 95064;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street:geo:-122.0632371,37.000369
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260422T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260422T121500
DTSTAMP:20260401T165930Z
CREATED:20260331T171056Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260401T165930Z
UID:10011819-1776855600-1776860100@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - Robust Machine Learning for Biomedical Data: Efficiency\, Reliability\, and Generalizability
DESCRIPTION:Presenter\nChenyu You\, Stony Brook University \nAbstract\nIn the rapidly growing area of machine learning\, there is profound promise in crafting intelligent\, data-driven methods for diverse real-world applications. Yet\, in safety-critical domains like healthcare\, some fundamental challenges remain: (1) The insufficiency of raw biomedical data emphasizes the need for data-efficient and robust learning approaches. (2) The imperative of safety and stability necessitates a cohesive framework that unifies learning with theoretical guarantees. (3) The inherent heterogeneity and distribution shifts in real-world clinical data call for robust and generalizable learning methods. To address these challenges\, there are several major directions I have explored: (i) (Robust) Machine Learning for Imperfect Medical Data: The development of machine learning models\, particularly in the context of label scarcity\, increasingly necessitates the collection of substantial annotated medical data. Moreover\, medical data often display a long-tailed class distribution\, which consequently results in notable imbalance issues. To this end\, there are several growing interests in training machine learning models jointly across imbalanced class distributions and limited annotations. I have developed novel\, efficient\, statistically consistent algorithms to improve empirical performance for biomedical image analysis. (ii) Learning with Theoretical Guarantees: As machine learning methods have become ubiquitous in clinical decision-making\, their reliability and interpretability have become important. This is particularly crucial in the field of biomedical image analysis\, where decision outcomes can have profound implications. I have developed novel machine learning algorithms that enable provably accurate anatomical modeling with theoretical guarantees. (iii) Generalize across Diverse Biomedical Data: The development of medical foundation models often requires massive and diverse biomedical data. To this end\, I have developed various foundation models for biomedical imaging data and explored novel applications of these models. I have also developed novel medical AI Agents that lead to the scalable and accurate predictive modeling\, particularly for distribution shift problems. \nSpeaker Bio\nChenyu You is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. He is also the core faculty member of the CVLab\, AI institute\, and affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. His research focuses on both fundamental and applied problems in computer vision and machine learning\, often with a focus on generalization\, and making machine learning more reliable. Our applied research includes applications to healthcare\, biomedical imaging\, and cognitive neuroscience. He received his Ph.D. in 2024 from Yale University under the advisement of James S. Duncan\, his M.S. in 2019 from Stanford University under the advisement of Daniel Rubin\, and his B.S. in 2017 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the advisement of Ge Wang\, all in electrical engineering. He has also spent wonderful time at Facebook AI Research (FAIR)\, as well as Google Research. He serves on the Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI)\, and the SUNY AI Symposium Planning Committee\, and as associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging\, Medical Image Analysis\, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems\, Pattern Recognition\, and Transactions on Machine Learning Research. He has received AAAI’26 New Faculty Highlights\, CPAL’26 Rising Stars Award\, Tinker Research Grant Award\, Lambda Research Grant Award\, ICML’25 Oral Presentation Award\, EMBC’25 Top Paper Award\, MICCAI’25 NIH Registration Grant Award\, IEEE TMI’25 Distinguished Associate Editor Certificate of Excellence Award\, and Yale George P. O’Leary Graduate Fellowship\, and has been ranked as the World’s Top 2% most-cited scientists by Stanford University since 2024\, is a member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society\, and received the Excellence in Teaching Award for Spring and Fall 2025. For more information\, please check his website: https://chenyuyou.me/. \nHosted by: Professor Yuyin Zhou \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit\, pastries\, coffee\, and tea will be provided.) \nZoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-robust-machine-learning-for-biomedical-data-efficiency-reliability-and-generalizability/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260421T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260421T113000
DTSTAMP:20260401T234645Z
CREATED:20260401T234645Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260401T234645Z
UID:10011845-1776765600-1776771000@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:BE Climate & Cookies Student Pop-Up!
DESCRIPTION:Come get excited about Baskin Engineering Climate Week at our student pop-up! 🌎 \nClimate Week is a chance to explore how Baskin Engineering is addressing climate challenges through innovative research\, teaching\, and hands-on projects. \nDiscover the events happening throughout the week and find ways to get involved! \nSwing by for FREE BE swag\, coffee\, cookies\, Climate Week stickers\, and more—first come\, first served! \nWhere: BE Courtyard\nWhen: Tuesday\, April 21\, 10:00-11:30 a.m. \nWe hope to see you there!
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/be-climate-week-pop-up-2026/
LOCATION:Jack Baskin Engineering\, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Social Gathering
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/BE-climate-week-pop-up.png
GEO:37.000369;-122.0632371
X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street Santa Cruz CA 95064;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street:geo:-122.0632371,37.000369
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260415T173000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260415T203000
DTSTAMP:20260402T171331Z
CREATED:20260325T220453Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260402T171331Z
UID:10011772-1776274200-1776285000@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Kraw Lecture: At the Forefront of AI: Innovation and Discovery
DESCRIPTION:Artificial intelligence is transforming how we understand and solve the world’s most complex challenges—while at the same time causing new challenges and concerns. We invite you to join us for a special UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture showcasing the faculty whose groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence is transforming science\, technology\, and society. From advances in autonomous systems and natural language processing to the development of sustainable and responsible AI\, this conversation will highlight the innovative work taking place across disciplines and the real-world impact it is poised to have. \nModerated by special guest Ahmad Thomas\, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG)\, this dynamic discussion will bring together leading researchers to explore how these technologies are shaping the future—accelerating discovery\, addressing complex global challenges\, and opening new frontiers for collaboration. Gain insight into the ideas\, discoveries\, and collaborations shaping the next generation of artificial intelligence research and hear from the leaders advancing this work.\n \n\n\nIn-Person Reception: 5:30 p.m.\nLecture: 6:15 p.m.\n\nRegister Now
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/kraw-lecture-at-the-forefront-of-ai-innovation-and-discovery/
LOCATION:The Quad Conference Center\, 2400 Sand Hill Rd\, Menlo Park\, CA\, 94025\, United States
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2526-014E_Kraw_Lecture_banner-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260415T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260415T121500
DTSTAMP:20260407T155318Z
CREATED:20260407T155318Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260407T155318Z
UID:10012050-1776250800-1776255300@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - Algorithmic Problems in Discrete Choice by Ravi Kumar
DESCRIPTION:Presenter: Ravi Kumar\, Google \nAbstract:\nIn discrete choice\, a user selects one option from a finite set of available alternatives\, a process that is crucial for recommendation systems applications in e-commerce\, social media\, search engines\, etc.  A popular way to model discrete choice is through Random Utility Models (RUMs).  RUMs assume that users assign values to options and choose the one with the highest value from among the available alternatives.  RUMs have become increasingly important in the Web era; they offer an elegant mathematical framework for researchers to model user choices and predict user behavior based on (possibly limited)  observations.   While RUMs have been extensively studied in behavioral economics and social sciences\, many basic algorithmic tasks remain poorly understood.  In this talk\, we will discuss various algorithmic and learning questions concerning RUMs. \nBio: \nRavi Kumar has been a research scientist at Google since 2012. Prior to this\, he was at the IBM Almaden Research Center and at Yahoo! Research. His interests include algorithms for massive data\, ML/privacy\, and the theory of computation. He maintains an extensive publication record that includes Test-of-Time Awards from STOC and WWW\, as well as Best Paper Awards from KDD and WWW\, to mention a few. He is an ACM fellow.\n\nHosted by: Professor Sungjin Im \n\nDate and Time: Wednesday\, April 15\, 2026 from 11:00 am – 12: 15 pm \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit\, pastries\, coffee\, and tea will be provided.) \n\nZoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3 \n\n 
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-algorithmic-problems-in-discrete-choice-by-ravi-kumar/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260414T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260414T160000
DTSTAMP:20260326T162922Z
CREATED:20260326T162922Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260326T162922Z
UID:10011787-1776175200-1776182400@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Castello\, J. (CSE) - Space Mission Simulation From the Outside In
DESCRIPTION:Robotic space missions often use discrete event simulation to reduce risk in operation. A simulation applies a set of planned activities to a model of mission resources\, and the model’s observed behavior is used to predict real-world outcomes. However\, logically concurrent activities are typically simulated under one possible linearization of their events – an order that may not reflect the eventual reality. Some simulation systems provide mechanisms for controlling the order of events; but this is a solution to a self-imposed problem. We instead question the assumption causing this problem: that events are totally ordered to begin with. \nWe study Merlin\, an open-source simulator developed at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and designed by the author\, that exchanges the traditional total order of events for a *partial* order. Under this approach\, a resumed activity can only observe events that causally precede its resumption\, and concurrent events are reconciled under custom policies. However\, the resulting design is more complex (and less understood) than that of linearizing simulators\, obscuring its key insights. As such\, we have developed Eidolon: a compact core calculus for Merlin-style simulation whose operational semantics follows an “outside-in”\, substitution-based execution model. Although Eidolon is derived from the concepts present in Merlin\, we intend it to be a vehicle for exploring non-linearizing simulation in general. \nFirst\, we propose making Eidolon *incremental*: a change to the set of planned activities should not incur a full resimulation from scratch except in the worse case\, instead reusing any cached computations that are not sensitive to the change. Since mission planning is a highly iterative process involving many simulations and subsequent tweaks to the plan\, incremental resimulation may allow plans to be finalized in less time\, or allow higher-quality plans to be obtained in the same amount of time. The substitution-oriented approach of Eidolon is what makes this feasible\, since individual computations align cleanly with subtree boundaries. \nSecond\, in the spirit of Reynolds’ defunctionalization and Danvy’s rational reconstruction\, we propose developing a denotational semantics for Eidolon and demonstrating its mechanical conversion into an abstract machine. As a mathematical artifact\, Eidolon is designed for reasoning and legibility rather than efficiency; nonetheless\, defunctionalization allows us to *refactor* our semantics into something that stands a chance of being practical. In particular\, defunctionalization reifies the recursive structure of a denotational semantics into an explicit data structure. As a result\, the defunctionalized form of Eidolon will recover an explicit priority queue like that of traditional linearizing simulators\, but without their assumption of total ordering. \nEvent Host: Jonathan Castello\, Ph.D. Student\, Computer Science and Engineering \nAdvisor: Lindsey Kuper  \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98171466380?pwd=L2rkpr8tEt0MZamYbxxPTfvhAd4gl6.1 \nPasscode- 990848 \n 
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/castello-j-cse-space-mission-simulation-from-the-outside-in/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260401T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260401T121500
DTSTAMP:20260330T203519Z
CREATED:20260325T164503Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260330T203519Z
UID:10011765-1775041200-1775045700@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - Messages from across the event horizon:  AI Agentic Design for Computer Architecture (and more generalizable learnings)
DESCRIPTION:Presenter: Christopher Fletcher\, UC Berkeley \nAbstract: \nIt is difficult to escape the hype of agentic coding.  Is the hype real?  Are we still living in ~Summer 2025 — when AI coding would accomplish little more than upset its human supervisor?  Or has a level shift in technology finally arrived? \nIn this talk I will argue the latter.  I will describe a self-imposed experiment to discover modern AI coding tools’ capabilities (starting mid February 2026).  I will try (my best) to communicate my utter and sheer surprise at where the state of the art actually is.  Then I will do a deep dive and try to relay everything I have learned about this new engineering discipline—based on my attempts to push the technology as hard as I can for the past 1.5 months.  I will conclude by pontificating about the future of computer architecture and academic research more generally. \nBio: \nChristopher Fletcher is an Associate Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley. He is a computer architect whose research spans architecture\, security\, and domain-specific acceleration\, especially at their intersections from cryptography and hardware attacks to algorithm-to-hardware co-design. His work has received 31 paper recognitions and several other honors\, including the NSF CAREER Award\, Intel and Google faculty awards\, UIUC research and promotion awards\, election to DARPA ISAT\, and MIT’s George M. Sprowls Award\, with related work also recognized by Scientific American as one of ten “World Changing Ideas.” \nHosted by: Professor Alvaro Cardenas \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit\, pastries\, coffee\, and tea will be provided.) \nZoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3 \n 
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-messages-from-across-the-event-horizon-ai-agentic-design-for-computer-architecture-and-more-generalizable-learnings/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260313T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260313T150000
DTSTAMP:20260219T170502Z
CREATED:20260219T170502Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260219T170502Z
UID:10009254-1773410400-1773414000@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Wang\, H. (CSE) - Accelerating RTL Simulation with Specialized Graph Partitioners
DESCRIPTION:Register transfer level (RTL) simulation is an invaluable tool for developing\, debugging\, verifying\, and validating hardware designs. However\, the performance of RTL simulation has long been a limiting factor in industry. Despite the inherent parallelism of hardware\, current RTL simulators have not achieved practical performance gains due to fundamental challenges in communication\, synchronization\, memory bandwidth\, and architectural mapping. \nThis dissertation addresses the RTL simulation performance problem from three complementary perspectives: optimizing simulation latency through parallelism\, improving aggregate throughput via deduplication\, and enabling efficient GPU acceleration with RTL-native semantics. \nFirst\, we present RepCut\, a parallel RTL simulation methodology that uses replication-aided partitioning to cut circuits into balanced partitions with minimal overlaps. By replicating the overlaps\, RepCut eliminates problematic data dependences between partitions and significantly reduces synchronization overhead. RepCut achieves superlinear speedups of up to 27.10x using 24 threads with only a 3.81% replication cost. \nSecond\, we introduce Simulation Deduplication\, a technique that exploits the extensive reuse of building blocks in modern hardware designs. By generating shared code for duplicated instances and carefully co-scheduling their execution\, we reduce the instruction cache footprint and memory bandwidth pressure. This approach achieves up to 1.95x speedup for single simulations and 2.09x improvement in overall batch simulation throughput. \nThird\, we present Toucan\, a GPU-accelerated RTL simulation framework that preserves RTL semantics rather than flattening designs to gate-level netlists. By leveraging native GPU arithmetic operations and introducing warp-level micro-partitioning with shuffle-based communication\, Toucan achieves efficient mapping of irregular circuit topologies to GPU SIMT architectures while maintaining fast compilation times. Toucan achieves up to 4.73x speedup over the state-of-the-art GPU RTL simulator on large multi-core designs. \nTogether\, these three approaches provide a comprehensive solution to RTL simulation performance optimization\, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art commercial and open-source simulators across multiple hardware platforms and design scales. \nEvent Host: Haoyuan Wang\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science and Engineering \nAdvisor: Jose Renau \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94044618343?pwd=xZkK8GmD28P2Vf8pbyl6aoOaNxxhya.1 \nPasscode- 574772
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/wang-h-cse-accelerating-rtl-simulation-with-specialized-graph-partitioners/
LOCATION:Jack Baskin Engineering\, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260313T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260313T120000
DTSTAMP:20260304T172425Z
CREATED:20260304T172425Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260304T172425Z
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SUMMARY:Moghadam\, M. (CE) - Constraint-Aware Scene Understanding and Trajectory Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Vehicles
DESCRIPTION:Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are commonly organized as modular pipelines that transform raw sensor measurements into low-level actuation commands through perception\, planning\, and control. While learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in perception and environment modeling\, the planning layer remains a key bottleneck for reliable autonomy. Highway driving in particular requires long-horizon reasoning and socially aware interaction with multiple actors\, while also producing smooth and dynamically feasible motion that can be tracked by classical controllers. \nThis thesis focuses on scene understanding and planning for highway driving. We study the problem through two complementary simulation environments: the high-fidelity CARLA simulator for motion planning and continuous trajectory generation under realistic vehicle dynamics and road geometry\, and the lightweight HighwayEnv simulator for interaction-rich behavior planning at high episode throughput. \nWe present three planning contributions that increase autonomy. First\, we introduce a modular hierarchical planning framework in Frenet space that combines long-term decision-making with short-term trajectory optimization. The approach includes a corridor-based dynamic obstacle avoidance strategy that generates spatiotemporal polynomial trajectories and supports diverse driving styles through interpretable parameter tuning. Second\, we propose an end-to-end continuous deep reinforcement learning approach that unifies decision-making and motion planning into a single policy that outputs continuous polynomial trajectories in the Frenet frame. A spatiotemporal observation tensor and a temporal convolutional backbone enable the learned planner to exploit interaction history and outperform optimization-based and discrete RL baselines in CARLA. Third\, we develop an interaction-aware behavior planning neural network architecture that couples trajectory prediction with high-level decision-making via a social pooling scene encoder built on actor histories and an ego-centered BEV representation. This unified design improves RL social awareness\, safety\, and overall driving performance in multi-agent highway scenarios in HighwayEnv. \nAcross extensive simulation studies\, the results show that constraint-aware representations and learning-based policies can improve planning quality beyond hand-crafted objectives\, especially when the policy is equipped with spatiotemporal social context while retaining classical feedback control for stable trajectory tracking. Finally\, we provide supporting simulation and evaluation infrastructure\, including observation tensor and neural network designs\, BEV utilities\, and scalable training and testing pipelines\, to enable reproducible research on learning-based planning in interactive traffic. \nEvent Host: Majid Moghadam\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Engineering  \nAdvisor: Gabriel Elkaim \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95848602314?pwd=2jlktZ6BChlXcyqT3anX4ZuKrYV4wE.1 \nPasscode- 325939
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/moghadam-m-ce-constraint-aware-scene-understanding-and-trajectory-generation-using-deep-reinforcement-learning-for-autonomous-vehicles/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260313T093000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260313T110000
DTSTAMP:20260217T203948Z
CREATED:20260217T203948Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260217T203948Z
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SUMMARY:Fan\, Y. (CSE) - Building Human-Centered Multimodal AI Agents
DESCRIPTION:As multimodal artificial intelligence systems become increasingly embedded in everyday technology\, there is a growing need to design human-centered AI agents that support and amplify human capabilities rather than replace them. This dissertation investigates how to build human-centered multimodal AI agents\, framing human-centeredness as an agent-level objective that requires both accessible\, assistive interaction and reliable\, trustworthy behavior across physical and digital environments. This dissertation explores two complementary dimensions of human-centered agent design. The first focuses on enhancing accessibility through conversational and interactive agents that assist users in everyday tasks. We study both embodied and digital settings in which agents reduce physical and cognitive burdens via natural language interaction\, including hands-free drone control\, navigation assistance in unfamiliar environments\, and interactive access to complex graphical user interfaces. The second dimension focuses on strengthening agent capability to improve reliability and trust. We investigate how agents can acquire environment-specific knowledge through autonomous exploration and how they can reason about visual information in a grounded and transparent manner\, drawing inspiration from human learning and reasoning behaviors. \nEvent Host: Yue Fan\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science and Engineering \nAdvisor: Xin Eric Wang \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99619642071?pwd=dwWOlkJxjbamgpB4IbRxYDXbngqXOE.1 \nPasscode- 467959
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/fan-y-cse-building-human-centered-multimodal-ai-agents/
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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LOCATION:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260311T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260311T130000
DTSTAMP:20260311T160620Z
CREATED:20260311T160620Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260311T160620Z
UID:10011304-1773226800-1773234000@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Yang\, S. (CSE) - Beyond Image Editing: Building Generalized Image Customization Systems
DESCRIPTION:Current generative vision models struggle with image customization that requires multi-step reasoning or real-world knowledge. This proposal introduces generalized image customization\, enabling systems to execute complex\, inferential modifications rather than just simple edits. The research focuses on the foundational framework required for this generalization\, specifically high-quality training data\, scalable evaluation benchmarks\, self-improving training paradigms that reduce reliance on paired annotations\, and unified multi-modal architectures. Building on two completed studies in data quality and evaluation\, this proposal outlines two future research directions to develop capable\, annotation-efficient\, and reasoning-native image customization systems. \nEvent Host: Siwei Yang\, Ph.D. Student\, Computer Science and Engineering \nAdvisor: Cihang Xie \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/3852138080?pwd=Z0MyTVM2WjdCbEM4OXVxWUhhei84dz09 \n 
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/yang-s-cse-beyond-image-editing-building-generalized-image-customization-systems/
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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LOCATION:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260311T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260311T121500
DTSTAMP:20260303T181914Z
CREATED:20260303T181914Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260303T181914Z
UID:10009389-1773226800-1773231300@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium: Co-Active AI-Assisted Programming
DESCRIPTION:Presenter: Nadia Polikarpova\, UCSD \nAbstract: \nAI-assisted programming has rapidly moved from novelty to default. Today\, most developers use AI coding tools\, and increasingly rely on agentic systems capable of making multi-step design and implementation decisions with minimal human guidance. While these systems boost productivity\, they also introduce new risks: developers may disengage from the reasoning behind generated code\, leading to shallow understanding\, loss of ownership\, and what is increasingly described as cognitive debt. \nIn this talk\, I argue that AI-driven software development must be co-active: humans and AI should remain continuously engaged in a shared process of understanding and decision-making. I will present two complementary research directions toward this goal. The first focuses on observability—helping developers understand\, validate\, and trace the behavior of AI-generated code. The second focuses on controllability—making AI decisions explicit\, persistent\, and steerable. Together\, these ideas restore programmer agency while maintaining the productivity gains of AI-assisted development. \nBio: \nNadia Polikarpova is an associate professor at UC San Diego\, and a member of the Programming Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014\, and then spent some time as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Nadia’s research interests are at the intersection of programming languages\, AI\, human-computer interaction\, and social computing. \nHosted by: Professor Nikos Tziavelis \nLocation: Engineering 2\, Room E2-180 (*Refreshments such as coffee\, tea\, pastries\, and fresh fruit will be available.) \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/cse-colloquium-co-active-ai-assisted-programming/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Seminars
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260310T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260310T173000
DTSTAMP:20260217T184921Z
CREATED:20260217T184921Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260217T184921Z
UID:10009240-1773160200-1773163800@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Mashhadi\, N. (CSE) - Compositional\, Clinically Conditioned\, and Confound-Aware Deep Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging
DESCRIPTION:Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of dementia. Neuroimaging and clinical biomarkers can reveal early disease changes\, but building reliable machine learning models is difficult because data come from different scanners and sites\, some modalities are missing\, labeled cohorts are limited\, and factors such as age and scanner/site effects can bias results. \nThis dissertation develops machine learning methods for robust\, interpretable\, and controllable analysis of AD-related neuroimaging data. First\, I introduce a modular\, graph-based framework for multimodal AD detection that treats datasets and models as nodes and directed edges that can be combined to build more complex predictors. Second\, I propose a clinically conditioned 3D VAE-GAN to synthesize brain MRI\, enhanced with diffusion-driven sampling in clinical feature space to improve realism and control\, supporting data augmentation. Third\, I present a disentangled 3D masked autoencoder (MAE) that learns separated representations for age\, pathology\, and scanner effects\, making it possible to isolate and adjust age\, pathology\, or scanner effects\, while remaining reliable across sites. \nTogether\, these contributions advance practical methods for modular prediction\, controllable image generation\, and confound-aware representation learning in neuroimaging\, with an emphasis on generalization and interpretability for clinically relevant applications. \nEvent Host: Najmeh Mashhadi\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science and Engineering \nAdvisor: Razvan Marinescu \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98195204428?pwd=nyfvbmd9t81Xj5Z3yPPVtu4R58CXHq.1 \nPasscode- 688069
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/mashhadi-n-cse-compositional-clinically-conditioned-and-confound-aware-deep-learning-for-alzheimers-disease-neuroimaging/
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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LOCATION:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260309T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260309T160000
DTSTAMP:20260303T174216Z
CREATED:20260303T174216Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260303T174216Z
UID:10009384-1773064800-1773072000@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Harrison\, D. (CS) - Multi-Level Control in Neural Dialogue Generation: Style\, Semantics\, and Selection through Over-Generation and Ranking
DESCRIPTION:End-to-end neural generation models have largely displaced the modular architectures that once gave dialogue system designers explicit control over what is said and how it is said. While these models produce fluent text\, they collapse content planning\, sentence planning\, and surface realization into a single undifferentiated decoding step\, sacrificing the controllable structure that earlier systems provided. This dissertation investigates how that structure can be recovered through the over-generate-and-rank (OGR) paradigm: generating multiple candidate outputs and selecting among them using learned or prompt-based ranking functions that jointly optimize semantic fidelity\, stylistic appropriateness\, and conversational coherence. We instantiate OGR at three levels of natural language generation for dialogue: utterance-level stylistic control\, cross-domain semantic evaluation\, and dialogue-level response selection. \nFirst\, we show that explicit conditioning mechanisms\, specifically decoder-level side constraints for personality variation and discourse contrast\, re-introduce stylistic control into neural sequence-to-sequence models without compromising semantic accuracy. Second\, we demonstrate that prompt-based learning with structured linguistic profiles achieves near-perfect personality accuracy and effectively zero slot error rate when combined with ranking\, establishing that LLM prompting with explicit pragmatic specifications can match or exceed fine-tuning for personality-conditioned generation. Third\, we develop a cross-domain semantic error rate evaluation framework that frames slot error computation as an extraction task\, using a LoRA-adapted language model to extract meaning representations from generated text and a trained ranker to select among candidate extractions\, achieving reliable evaluation across 23 topic domains without domain-specific rules. Fourth\, we build and evaluate a speaker-aware transformer response ranker for Athena\, our Alexa Prize socialbot\, demonstrating that learned ranking over heterogeneous generator pools produces significantly longer conversations and higher user ratings than heuristic rule-based selection in a live A/B study with over 6\,000 conversations. \nA unifying finding emerges across all four contributions: the pragmatic features that control personality style in generation—acknowledgements\, engagement questions\, hedges\, exclamations—are the same features that distinguish high-quality from mediocre responses in open-domain dialogue. This parallel reveals that stylistic control and response ranking are complementary mechanisms for achieving the same goal: making dialogue systems sound more natural and engaging. Together\, these results support the dissertation’s central hypothesis that over-generate-and-rank provides a general\, extensible mechanism for controllable neural language generation\, restoring explicit decision points where competing communicative objectives can be weighed. The ranking function serves a role analogous to the sentence planner in classical NLG architectures\, but operates on the outputs of modern neural and LLM-based generators. \n  \nEvent Host: Davan Harrison\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science \nAdvisor: Marilyn Walker \n 
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/harrison-d-cs-multi-level-control-in-neural-dialogue-generation-style-semantics-and-selection-through-over-generation-and-ranking/
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260305T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260305T150000
DTSTAMP:20260217T182432Z
CREATED:20260217T182432Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260217T182432Z
UID:10009238-1772715600-1772722800@live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io
SUMMARY:Xu\, Y. (CSE) - Right Place\, Right Time: Accelerating Edge Computation on Modern Heterogeneous SoCs
DESCRIPTION:Modern edge computing increasingly relies on heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. These chips tightly integrate general-purpose CPUs with various specialized accelerators\, including GPUs\, FPGAs\, and AI accelerators\, all under a shared memory architecture. Although these shared-memory SoCs enable more efficient communication and data sharing between different processing units\, they are notoriously difficult to program and tune due to architectural diversity across vendors and asymmetric compute capabilities within each SoC. \nThis dissertation introduces Redwood and BetterTogether\, two frameworks that rethink CPU-accelerator collaboration on heterogeneous SoCs. Redwood targets a class of algorithms termed traverse–compute\, that combine irregular tree traversals with dense leaf-level computation\, e.g.\, Nearest-Neighbor Search and Barnes–Hut algorithm. \nIt addresses the efficient mapping of these algorithms onto heterogeneous systems by exploiting the architectural strengths of CPUs\, GPUs\, and FPGAs. BetterTogether extends this methodology to a different class of edge workloads\, specifically multi-stage pipelines and neural networks commonly used in computer vision tasks. Furthermore\, it introduces interference-aware analysis and scheduling techniques tailored for mobile SoCs. Finally\, to broaden the scope of heterogeneous acceleration\, we evaluated emerging domain-specific accelerators. We provide a preliminary analysis of Tensor Processing Units and Tensor Cores within the context of modern programming abstractions. \nEvent Host: Yanwen Xu\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science and Engineering \nAdvisor: Tyler Sorensen \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/5354629158?pwd=0CVhbwLuXDMX5fAGZd63tcfNqDWp0t.1 \nPasscode- 114514
URL:https://live-events-ucsc.pantheonsite.io/event/xu-y-cse-right-place-right-time-accelerating-edge-computation-on-modern-heterogeneous-socs/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR