A community gathering of people interested in PyTorch and the projects that use it – not an official PyTorch organization. Sponsored by Red Hat and University of California Santa Cruz Location: Engineering 2, Room 180 Food, Socializing, and Excellent talks from the PyTorch Ecosystem 5:30 – 6:30 Food and Socializing 6:30 – 7:00 Talk 1 […]
Due to their increasing complexity, autonomous decision-making agents rely on increasingly advanced algorithms, from classical control theory to reinforcement learning (RL) and, more recently, large vision-language models. While these algorithms help automate the decision-making in complex systems, they bring newer attack vulnerabilities that an adversary can exploit. In this dissertation, we study the security of […]
Presenter: Mario Stanke, Professor of Bioinformatics, University of Greifswald Description: This talk will explore recent machine learning approaches for eukaryotic genome annotation. Our supervised ab initio deep gene finder, Tiberius, correctly predicts more than four times as many human protein-coding gene structures as its father, Augustus, and in some clades, it approaches the accuracy of […]
Real-time monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks calls for statistical models that recover interpretable quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number from noisy count data, track posterior uncertainty, and run on time scales compatible with daily updates. Existing methods address these aims through separate model classes. Discretized Hawkes processes, Poisson autoregressions, and distributed lag models each […]
Edge computing and distributed AI systems increasingly operate under heterogeneous resources, dynamic workloads, and frequent failures, requiring both adaptivity and fault tolerance for efficient execution. In heterogeneous edge clusters, nodes […]
Modern software increasingly relies on distributed systems to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable services. Choreographic programming brings a global perspective to distributed system development: programmers write a single program that […]
Modern high-performance GPU kernels increasingly rely on subgroup-level execution, including subgroup-level communication, subgroup operations, and matrix operations. These features are essential for workloads such as matrix multiplication and FlashAttention, but […]
Many genetics pipelines start by aligning sequencing reads to a reference genome. Aligners attempt to find the position in the reference sequence which best matches the read sequence, but this […]
As quantum computing transitions from theory to practice, understanding which algorithms suit near-term devices becomes critical. Current quantum computers are severely constrained by limited qubit counts, short coherence times, and high error rates that quickly degrade computation into noise. This thesis addresses two interconnected questions: what non-trivial computational tasks can near-term devices execute and how […]
Centromeres ensure proper chromosome segregation during cell division, yet the organization and regulation of centromeric chromatin within satellite DNA arrays remain incompletely understood. Here, we leverage the complete diploid human genome benchmark (T2T-HG002) to provide a detailed study of centromeric sequence and chromatin architecture on individual haplotypes. Using adaptive-sampling-enriched, ultra-long-read DiMeLo-seq, we achieve single-molecule chromatin […]
Presenter: Sai Teja Peddinti, Google Abstract: As the digital landscape expands, traditional models of threat mitigation and user support are failing to keep pace with the unprecedented security, privacy, and safety challenges. Fortunately, the rise of large language models (LLMs) offers a powerful new paradigm for defense. This talk explores how LLMs are being leveraged […]
The electric grid is essential to modern society, and recent developments such as renewable energy sources (RESs), battery energy storage systems (ESSs), and microgrids (MGs) have necessitated novel computational methods for planning and operations. Machine learning offers a promising lever here, both as an accelerator for and proxy to traditional optimization-based problems. In this thesis, […]
Recently, a class of non-invasive hardware side-channel attacks has been discovered in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These attacks extract remnants of prior users’ activity that persist as transistor defect states within reconfigurable routing resources. These remnants are known as FPGA Pentimenti. Resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) is a compelling candidate for pentimenti-like attacks beyond FPGAs. However, […]
Presented by: Alex Olwal Description: “In this talk, I will share my perspectives on the evolution and future of human-centered augmentation, through the lens of two decades of research and development. Drawing from experiences across academia and industry, I will discuss insights from having led projects in augmented reality, accessibility, electronic textiles, novel sensing and […]
Presenter: Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor, UC Santa Cruz Description: Recently, applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have far outpaced Moore’s law in chip development, thus creating an increasingly large gap between user demand and the supply that the semiconductor industry can deliver. In this talk, we will discuss the unique […]
This dissertation investigates how neuromorphic and brain-inspired principles can guide the design of efficient neural language architectures. It addresses two central limitations of modern Transformer-based language models: memory growth with context length and high computational cost from dense matrix multiplication. Through studies of spiking neural networks, linear-recurrent language models, hybrid attention architectures, MatMul-free models, and […]
Autonomous systems, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and drones, are increasingly deployed across a wider array of contexts for both civilian and military use. As these systems become more common, they may be targeted by malicious actors seeking to exploit and abuse them, compromising safety-critical operations. Among the ways to protect these systems simulation based […]
Modern datacenter CPUs lose 25–66% of execution cycles to instruction-delivery stalls. This bottleneck persists, despite the recent trend towards accelerators and GPUs, as there is continuing demand by applications that only execute on CPUs. Two workload classes dominate today’s datacenter execution cycles: hyperscale server software (databases, build systems, and content stores), whose large instruction footprints […]
Presenter: Laura Waller, UC Berkeley Abstract: Computational imaging jointly designs hardware and algorithms to push beyond the classical limits of imaging, enabling measurement of new quantities (e.g. 3D, phase, and super-resolution) with simple, inexpensive hardware. These approaches have already transformed consumer photography; our goal is to achieve a similar transformation in scientific microscopy. In this […]
Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) agents promise effective security automation with minimal human intervention, yet their deployment raises three interconnected challenges: agents must be realistic (reproducing diverse attacker sophistication), secure (preventing autonomy from becoming an attack surface), and feasible (safely replicating human behavior at full autonomy). We argue that these three properties are requirements for ACO […]