• Zhou, K. (CSE) – Toward Safer Frontier AI: From Evaluation and Red-Teaming to Alignment and Oversight

    Virtual Event

    This dissertation investigates how to make modern AI systems safer as they grow more capable. It addresses two central sources of risk: malicious misuse, in which adversarial users coerce models into harmful behavior, and internal misalignment, in which models themselves pursue goals that diverge from human intent through deception, sandbagging, or other covert behaviors. The […]

  • Qureshi, A. (ECE) – ISoC: A Universal Impedance Spectroscopy Instrument-on-Chip in SKY130 130 nm CMOS

    Virtual Event

    Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is the workhorse measurement behind lithium-ion battery diagnostics, biosensing, and corrosion science — yet no integrated circuit has ever delivered the complete capability of a benchtop analyzer on a single die. This dissertation presents ISoC, the first universal Impedance Spectroscopy instrument-on-chip. Designed in SkyWater 130 nm CMOS process, ISoC supports all […]

  • Insurance, Risk, and Resilience in a Changing World

    Virtual Event

    Climate change is reshaping every system it touches. This panel examines one that most people haven’t much considered in climate terms: insurance. When the industry built to share risk retreats […]

    Free
  • BME80G Seminar – Katherine Bonini, “Rethinking Familial Risk in Genomic Medicine: Ethical Approaches to Cascade Screening”

    Jack Baskin Auditorium 191 Baskin Cir, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Katherine Bonini, Senior Genetic Counselor @ Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai   Description: It has long been argued that families are central to genomic medicine. Genomic risk, diagnosis, and management are rarely confined to a single individual, and separating patients’ interests from those of their relatives is often neither straightforward nor desirable. Despite this, […]

  • Zhu, R. (ECE) – From Neuromorphic Principles to Efficient Neural Language Architectures

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

    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 […]

  • Making an Exoneree Showcase

    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    Audiences are invited to Making an Exoneree, a reception and film screening featuring the premiere of five student-made short documentaries that reveal the facts—and falsehoods—of wrongful conviction cases from around […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • ECE 290 Seminar: Memristors for a brain-scale neuromorphic chip

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

    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 […]

  • CM Seminar – Alex Olwal, “Human-Centered Augmentation: Interacting with Matter, Humans, and Machines”

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

    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 […]

  • Seminar Series | What you may not know about groundwater management in California with Ruth Langridge

    Interdisciplinary Sciences Building 7487 Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Host: ENVS Personnel Committee Groundwater is a critical source of California’s water supply. Many basins in critical overdraft are now being managed under the 2015 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to support state goals of sustainable and equitable management. However, court adjudicated basins that encompass over 8,000 square miles and are home to nearly 11 […]

  • AM Seminar: Using Math and Experiments to Study the Control of Cell Metabolism

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

    Presenter: Denis Titov, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley Description: Cells run thousands of chemical reactions simultaneously, and these reactions must be precisely controlled—like a thermostat that prevents overheating. When this control fails, diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and fatty liver disease result. One key control mechanism is allosteric regulation, where a small molecule binds […]

  • Discover Bioinformatics: Data, Biology & Innovation

    Silicon Valley Campus 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, United States

    Lead the next wave of innovation in life sciences and data As biotechnology and data analytics converge, the demand for professionals who can interpret complex biological data and drive discovery […]

  • Sheaves, T. (CSE) – Timing Side-Channels in Commercial ReRAM: Toward ReRAM Pentimenti

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

    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, […]

  • Figuerres, S. (ECE) – Ion Transport Mechanisms for Bioelectronics

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

    Ion transfer as the movement of charged species across spaces and interfaces is the basis of signaling in nearly all biological systems. My research is grounded in the idea that precise control over ion transfer enables direct manipulation of biological function. Specifically, I focus on how ion transport can be engineered to regulate both collective […]

  • Bose, S. (ECE) – Learning-Augmented Optimization, Control, and Inference in Modern Power Systems

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

    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, […]

  • Morey, C. (BMEB) – Innovations in Interdependence: Genomic and Functional Evolution in Invertebrates and Their Intracellular Symbionts

    Biomedical Sciences Building 575 McLaughlin Drive
    Hybrid Event

    Intracellular symbionts are microorganisms, such as bacteria, that live within host cells. These associations are widespread throughout the invertebrate tree of life, and can perform a diversity of key metabolic, immune-response, or other functions that the host is dependent on for survival or reproduction. Intracellular symbioses allow both the host and the symbiont to occupy […]

  • Career Opportunities at Institute on Aging

    Social Sciences 2 College Ten Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Join us for snacks and to meet program leaders and recruitment specialists and learn about the opportunities available for careers at IOA! Institute on Aging is a nonprofit that was formed […]

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

    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 […]

    Free
  • Xu, D. (BMEB) – Interplay Between CENP-A, DNA Methylation, and H3K9me3 in Defining Centromere Identity

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

    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 […]