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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260301T000000
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SUMMARY:March is Hummingbird Month at the UCSC Arboretum & Botanic Garden
DESCRIPTION:March is Hummingbird Month at the UCSC Arboretum & Botanic Garden \nThis time of year\, the Arboretum hosts both Anna’s and Allen’s hummingbirds\, the two most common species in Northern California. “The density of hummingbirds—the number per area in the Arboretum—is ridiculously high\,” says Bruce Lyon\, Professor Emeriti of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCSC. “You can watch them feeding on flowers\, you can watch their courtship\, you can watch them chasing different species. It’s a great opportunity to see some pretty amazing hummingbird biology.” \nIn celebration of this special time of year\, we invite you to visit the garden as much as possible! We will have presentations\, workshops\, and tours throughout the month. See our webpage for a schedule of activities and more information about hummingbirds and the abundance of plants at the Arboretum that attract them. \nWe will also feature hummingbird merchandise and hummingbird-attracting plants at our gift shop and nursery. Visit Norrie’s Gift & Garden Shop\, Tuesdays thru Sundays from 10 – 4. For more information visit: https://arboretum.ucsc.edu/garden-shop/ \nAll events are free with paid admission: Adults: $10\, Seniors $8 and Youth 4-17 $5. Current UCSC students are free. Rain cancels outdoor activities. \nCurrent Arboretum members are always free and enjoy other great benefits year-round!  Join Today at https://arboretum.ucsc.edu/get-involved/join-us/    \n  \n 
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/march-is-hummingbird-month-at-the-ucsc-arboretum-botanic-garden/
LOCATION:Arboretum\, 122 Arboretum Road\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260302T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260306T235959
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SUMMARY:Optional Practical Training (OPT) Awareness Week
DESCRIPTION:Join us for OPT Awareness Week at UC Santa Cruz\, a supportive and informative series designed to help international students learn about and confidently prepare for Optional Practical Training. You’ll learn application steps\, key timelines\, and employment rules while connecting with advisors and peers who are here to help you succeed. Whether you’re just starting to explore OPT or ready to apply\, this week offers the tools and clarity you need to move forward with confidence. \nVisit our website to explore the different workshops and sessions.
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/optional-practical-training-opt-awareness-week/
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T121500
DTSTAMP:20260421T152904
CREATED:20260217T182353Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260217T182353Z
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SUMMARY:CSE Colloquium - Improving Efficiency and Reliability of Foundation Models in Clinical AI
DESCRIPTION:Presenter: Vasiliki “Vicky” Bikia\, PhD\, Stanford Department of Biomedical Data Science and Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) \nAbstract: \nDeploying 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 reduced-resolution distillation for multimodal clinical data\, particularly medical imaging. As model and input sizes increase\, inference cost and memory constraints become major barriers to deployment. We investigate how high-capacity teacher models can transfer structured knowledge to compact student models trained on downsampled images\, using embedding-space supervision to preserve clinically meaningful representations while reducing computational footprint. The second study examines the reliability of AI-generated clinical text. Foundation models are increasingly used to produce discharge summaries and patient-facing explanations\, yet fluency does not guarantee safety. We develop a structured evaluation framework grounded in clinical error taxonomies and clinician-calibrated metrics to quantify hallucinations\, omissions\, and semantic misalignment. Together\, these studies emphasize that scalable clinical AI requires not only smaller and faster models\, but also rigorous evaluation of generative reliability before deployment. \nBio: \nVasiliki Bikia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University\, affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Data Science and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). She received an Advanced Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki\, and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Her research focuses on medical foundation models\, structured representations of health data\, and the evaluation of generative systems in clinical settings. Previously\, she was a Machine Learning Scientist at the Mussallem Center for Biodesign at Stanford University\, where she developed software pipelines to improve data accessibility and interoperability in digital health applications. Vasiliki was selected as an MIT Rising Star in EECS (2025) and as an Emerson Consequential Scholar (2025)\, and is actively engaged with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem through collaborations at the intersection of research\, industry\, and healthcare. She is an organizing member of the Conference on Health\, Inference\, and Learning (CHIL) and serves as Unconference Chair for the 2025 and 2026 editions\, where she leads the design and execution of the entrepreneurship-focused track bridging academic research and real-world deployment. Her work has appeared in venues including IEEE journals\, npj Digital Medicine\, Nature Communications\, and leading AI conferences\, and she has contributed to multiple funded research proposals and clinical studies at the intersection of AI\, medicine\, and translational impact. \nHosted by: Professor Nikos Tziavelis \nLocation: Engineering 2\, E2-180 (*Refreshments such as coffee\, tea\, fresh fruit\, and pastries will be provided) \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=YkJ2TQtF79h0PcNXbEcpZLbpK0coiY.1&jst=3
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/cse-colloquium-improving-efficiency-and-reliability-of-foundation-models-in-clinical-ai/
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:20260304T130000
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SUMMARY:Shields\, S. (CM) - Procedural\, Player-Centric Game Balancing
DESCRIPTION:Game balance is a term widely used among players\, researchers\, and designers of games. It is a concept that feels vitally important to how we make and play games – but when we try to define it or implement it\, we seldom get the same definition twice. Balance appears differently to whoever is judging it\, but as researchers and designers we still must translate this element of game design into technical practice. It also is an expensive and time-consuming subject\, one that requires a constant loop of playtesting and design iteration through nearly the entirety of the game development process. \nThis work seeks to focus our understanding of balance while offering procedural methods to either increase speed or improve quality when performing balancing tasks in game design and research. It accomplishes this by offering a taxonomy of balance alongside a generic design framework that can be used to apply balancing strategies to any game context. It additionally provides a catalog of balancing methods\, allowing designers to use common patterns to apply procedural balancing to their games. Finally\, I offer three technical examples using the taxonomy and framework\, putting theoretical knowledge of balance into concrete technical systems. \nBalance ultimately helps us design games that make us feel fairness in our play. By sharpening and optimizing our understanding of the term\, we improve the games we make and open new doors in game systems design. \nEvent Host: Sam Shields\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computational Media  \nAdvisor: Edward F. Melcer \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98956788669?pwd=ao7DzYQebCeS3SJ4PsGaZeGYhYMVNI.1 \nPasscode- 713173
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/shields-s-cm-procedural-player-centric-game-balancing/
LOCATION:Merrill College\, College Office\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T153000
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SUMMARY:Sonic Icons: Relation\, Recognition\, and Revival in a Syriac World
DESCRIPTION:Talk Abstract: To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries at all\, they are usually invoked to make a political point about the need for Western military intervention in places like Iraq or Syria\, or they are cited as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West. Sonic Icons argues that these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit by tracking a diasporic network of Syriac Orthodox Christians—also known as Assyrians\, Aramaeans\, and Syriacs—in the Netherlands who intertwine religious practice with political activism to “save” Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe. \nComing of age in a historical moment when much of their tradition has been destroyed or forgotten by war\, dispossession\, displacement\, and genocide—their story of self-discovery is a story of survival\, revival\, and reinvention. Their activism is oriented toward seeking a complex form of recognition for what they understand to be the ethical core of Christian kinship in an ethnic as well as in a religious sense\, despite living in societies that do not recognize this unhyphenated form of ethnoreligious identity as a politically legitimate mode of public identity. Drawing on both theological and linguistic theories of the icon\, Sonic Icons rethinks foundational theoretical accounts of ethnicization\, racialization\, and secularization by examining how kinship gets made\, claimed\, and named in the global politics of minority recognition. \n  \nSpeaker Bio: A cultural anthropologist by training (UCSC ’13)\, Dr. Sarah Bakker Kellogg is a sensory ethnographer whose research and writing documents minor traditions of knowledge\, care\, and relational world-making. Known for her methodological creativity\, her work centers questions of reproduction\, ethics\, and justice at the intersection of religious studies\, gender studies\, migration studies\, and political economy. The author of Sonic Icons: Relation\, Recognition\, and Revival in a Syriac World published by Fordham University Press (2025)\, she has also won numerous awards\, research grants\, and fellowships\, including the SSRC’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship\, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship\, and the Wenner Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her new research project is an ethnographic and historical investigation of interfaith activist traditions organized around immigration\, racial reparations\, and economic justice.
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/sonic-icons-relation-recognition-and-revival-in-a-syriac-world/
LOCATION:Social Sciences 1\, Social Sciences 1\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T173000
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SUMMARY:The UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series presents: Unmasking cancer's complete genetic code
DESCRIPTION:In this Kraw lecture\, Angela Brooks will discuss her work on cancer research. \nCurrent cancer research focuses almost entirely on finding errors—mutations—in DNA. This has given us incredible tools like precision oncology\, matching patients with targeted drugs. But cancer cells almost always develop drug resistance\, causing treatments to fail and limiting patient survival. An often-overlooked aspect of cancer genes is the messenger RNA\, which is copied from DNA\, then translated into protein to do the work of the cell. Over 95% of human genes have isoforms\, which are different versions of the RNA message created through a process called RNA splicing. These different messages lead to slightly different proteins\, and we believe our lack of knowledge of different isoforms is a missing cause of treatment failure. \n\nIn-Person Reception: 5:30 p.m.\nLecture: 6–7 p.m.\n\nREGISTER
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/the-uc-santa-cruz-kraw-lecture-series-presents-unmasking-cancers-complete-genetic-code/
LOCATION:Silicon Valley Campus\, 3175 Bowers Avenue\, Santa Clara\, CA\, 95054\, United States
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T193000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152905
CREATED:20260112T231120Z
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SUMMARY:Unexpected Returns: The Historic Entanglements of Fire\, Settlement\, and Stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains
DESCRIPTION:Join UCSC  faculty members Miriam Greenberg and Andrew Matthews as they discuss the deep regional histories of fire\, from indigenous burning\, settler ranching\, fire suppression\, and much more.\n \nThis event is part of Intersections of Climate Change\,  a series organized with the Friedlaender Lab in conjunction with Weather and the Whale.\n\nADMISSION\n– FREE and open to the public \nPARKING\n– The entrance to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences Galleries is on Delaware Street and has an accessibility ramp.\n– Convenient and free self-parking is available on Panetta Avenue and High Road\, immediately adjacent to the galleries.\n– Accessible parking is on High Road.\n—\nThis program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/unexpected-returns-the-historic-entanglements-of-fire-settlement-and-stewardship-in-the-santa-cruz-mountains/
LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Ave\, Santa Cruz\, United States
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations
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