Computer Science and Engineering Department

The Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department housed within the Baskin School of Engineering spans multiple areas of research including theory, systems, AI/ML, architectures, and software. In cooperation with other departments on campus, CSE also offers a strong research group in bioinformatics, computational biology, biomolecular engineering, and human genome mapping. The CSE department enjoys a close relationship with the Electrical and Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics departments. Faculty members carry out joint research projects, supervise students, and teach courses for these departments.

Events from this organizer

Today

  • BE logo

    CSE Colloquium – Query Optimization: How to design a Meta-Algorithm that designs Algorithms?

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

    Presenter: Mahmoud Abo Khamis, RelationalAI Abstract: Database systems have evolved from simple bookkeeping tools to comprehensive data analytics platforms capable of learning from the data and making business decisions. As a result, database queries expanded in their expressive power and applications to include tensor computations, constraint satisfaction problems, graph analytics, scientific computing, SAT solving, among […]

    Free

  • Fredrickson, K. (CSE) – Practical Anonymity with Formal Resistance to Traffic Analysis

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

    Anonymous communication systems hide who is talking to whom, not just what is said. However, existing systems are either vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks–attacks where adversaries observe and correlate the network traffic of users–or are forced to rely on unrealistic and unenforceable assumptions about how users behave. Worse, existing theory lacks tools to rigorously model […]

  • Two students sit in the BE Courtyard and drink coffee

    Transform Your Future Pop-Up (Cookies Included!)

    Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Join Baskin Engineering to celebrate National Engineers Week with a sweet stop at the Transform Your Future Pop-Up (Cookies Included!) 🍪☕ This year’s Engineers Week theme, Transform Your Future, is a powerful reminder that engineering doesn’t just shape our world—it shapes our opportunities, our communities, and the futures we can imagine for ourselves. Swing by […]

  • Neta Haiby

    AI and Security 101

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

    Join us for an informative conversation with Neta Haiby, Head of Product | AI Security at Microsoft! Artificial Intelligence is transforming both cyber defense and cyber offense. It creates unique risks in how we build, deploy, and operate AI apps and Agents. This session examines how AI can be attacked or misused – through techniques […]

  • Liu, C. (CSE) – Enabling LLM Unlearning at Inference Time by Decomposing Detection and Intervention

    Virtual Event

    Machine unlearning addresses the “right to be forgotten” under GDPR and enables privacy, copyright, and safety compliance in large language models. Training-based unlearning can remove targeted behavior on benchmarks, but it scales poorly, can degrade utility, and can fail under adversarial prompting that recovers supposedly forgotten content. This prospectus proposes inference-time behavioral unlearning: rather than […]

  • BE logo

    CSE Colloquium: Agile and evolvable software construction in the era of rapidly evolving hardware accelerator designs

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

    Presenter Charith Mendis, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract Modern AI workloads have become exceedingly abundant and important in the current computing landscape. As a result, there have been numerous software and hardware innovations aimed at accelerating these workloads. However, we observe a subtle disconnect between the software […]

    Free
  • BE logo

    Exploring Research Pathways at Baskin Engineering

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

    Curious how being part of a research lab can supercharge your experience as a Baskin Engineer?   Join us for this informative event to learn about opportunities to solve open-ended problems, build deeper technical skills, and learn how to think like an engineer. We’ll kick things off with a quick overview of the kinds of research […]

  • Rocket Team in Slugworks

    BE Club Bash – Engineers Week

    Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Discover innovation at the Baskin Engineering Club Bash, an event celebrating National Engineers Week! Mark your calendars for Thursday, February 26, 12–2 PM in the BE Courtyard! The BE Club Bash brings together student organizations across all engineering disciplines to showcase their projects, demos, and interactive activities. Stop by to: Explore hands-on booths and demonstrations from student organizations Learn about engineering opportunities on […]

  • Semiconductor Career Summit – From Campus to Silicon Valley

    Stevenson Event Center Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    A SEMI Professional Development Seminar organized by the SEMI Silicon Valley Chapter – Connecting College Students to the Semiconductor Industry. Learn about career opportunities in high tech and acquire valuable, practical information that will help you choose career directions and plan for your success.

  • CSE Colloquium – Improving Efficiency and Reliability of Foundation Models in Clinical AI

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

    Presenter: Vasiliki “Vicky” Bikia, PhD, Stanford Department of Biomedical Data Science and Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) Abstract: Deploying foundation models in health requires both computational efficiency and reliable generation. In this talk, I present two studies that address these dimensions separately but with a shared goal of real-world clinical deployment. The first study focuses on […]

    Free

  • Harrison, D. (CS) – Multi-Level Control in Neural Dialogue Generation: Style, Semantics, and Selection through Over-Generation and Ranking

    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 […]

  • BE logo

    CSE Colloquium: Co-Active AI-Assisted Programming

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

    Presenter: Nadia Polikarpova, UCSD Abstract: AI-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 […]

    Free

  • Fan, Y. (CSE) – Building Human-Centered Multimodal AI Agents

    Virtual Event

    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 […]

  • Moghadam, M. (CE) – Constraint-Aware Scene Understanding and Trajectory Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

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

    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 […]

  • Wang, H. (CSE) – Accelerating RTL Simulation with Specialized Graph Partitioners

    Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    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, […]

  • Baskin Engineering logo

    CSE Colloquium – Messages from across the event horizon:  AI Agentic Design for Computer Architecture (and more generalizable learnings)

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

    Presenter: Christopher Fletcher, UC Berkeley Abstract: It 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? In this talk I will argue the latter.  I will […]

    Free

  • Castello, J. (CSE) – Space Mission Simulation From the Outside In

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

    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 […]