Events

CSE Colloquium: Agile and evolvable software construction in the era of rapidly evolving hardware accelerator designs
2026-02-25 11:00 - 12:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 and hardware communities. Most software innovations target well-established hardware platforms such as CPUs (e.g., x86, ARM) and GPUs (e.g., NVidia GPUs), while hardware innovations produce plenty of other tensor accelerator designs (e.g., Gemmini, Feather, Trainium) each year.

We asked the question, why aren’t the software community using these accelerators or even evaluating on them? The simple yet undeniable reason is the lack of standardized software tooling compared to CPUs and GPUs. For an architecture to be used, properly designed compiler backends, correctness, and performance testing tools should be abundant (e.g., CUDA ecosystem).

In this talk, I will describe how we bridge this gap by automatically generating the necessary software tools for a large class of accelerators through the Accelerator Compiler Toolkit (ACT) ecosystem. Central to ACT is an ISA definition language, TAIDL, that for the first time standardizes the hardware-software interfaces for a large class of accelerators. Departing from the traditional approach of manually constructing test oracles, performance models, or retargetable compiler backends, we instead introduce agile and evolvable methodologies to automatically generate such necessary tooling using both formal methods and machine learning techniques for any TAIDL-defined accelerator interface. I will show how such automation enables rapid software prototyping, making rapidly evolving accelerator designs usable by the software community.

Bio

Charith Mendis is an Assistant Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His broad research interests are at the intersection of compilers, programming languages, and machine learning. He received his Ph.D. and Master’s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.Sc. from the University of Moratuwa. He is the recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award, the Outstanding Advisor award at UIUC, the William A. Martin Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award at MIT, and the University Gold Medal for his B.Sc. He has won numerous paper awards, including a Distinguished Paper Award at POPL, a Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE BigData conference, an honorable mention for the Best Artifact Award at SIGMOD, a Best Paper Award at ML for Systems workshop at ISCA, and an IEEE Top Picks Honorable Mention.

Hosted by: Professor Nikos Tziavelis

Location: Engineering 2, E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit, pastries, tea, and coffee will be available for guests.)

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

February 25, 2026 | Works-in-Progress with Geoffrey Bowker
2026-02-25 15:00 - 17:00 | CA
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
3:00 – 5:00 PM
Humanities 1, Room 210 or Zoom (Registration)
Join SJRC scholars in Humanities 1, room 210 or on Zoom for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work.
At this session, we will hear from Geoffrey Bowker, Emeritus Professor in Irvine and Science & Justice Advisor about works-in-progress and ongoing work on the death of infrastructure, AI, and underwater network cables and his collaborative comic book on Actor Network Theory. SJRC members Warren Sack and Dimitris Papadopolous will act as “warm up” discussants.
Contact Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu) or Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (puig@ucsc.edu) for the readings, including a new comic book on the graveyard of machines!
Register for Zoom here.
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Emeritus Professor at the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, where he directed a laboratory for Values in the Design of Information Systems and Technology. He was also Professor of and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh School, and Executive Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara. He was awarded the prestigious 4S Bernal Prize in 2024 for his distinguished, career-long contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). His book Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT Press 2008) won the 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and was awarded “Best Information Science Book” by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).
Co-sponsored by earthecologies x technoscience conversations, History of Consciousness

Exploring Research Pathways at Baskin Engineering
2026-02-25 17:30 - 19:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 opportunities available to undergrads and how to get started, then you’ll hear directly from students who’ve worked in research labs as undergraduates. They’ll share what they actually did day-to-day, the skills they built (technical and professional), and how research shaped their confidence, career goals, and next steps. We’ll then have pizza and networking to end the evening.
Whether you’re aiming for industry, graduate school, or just want hands-on experience that goes beyond coursework, this panel will help you understand how undergraduate research can set you apart—academically, professionally, and personally!

Register via Handshake.
YOU BELONG HERE
Programs 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.

BME 280B Seminar: The evolution of structural variation across vertebrate genomes
2026-02-26 11:40 - 13:15 | Physical Sciences Building, Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Peter Sudmant, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Description: Structural variants (SVs) contribute substantially to genetic variation and play vital roles in adaptation and disease. However, SVs are poorly captured by short read sequencing and thus are understudied, particularly in non-model organisms. Here, taking advantage of recently generated haplotype-resolved genome assemblies from >600 vertebrate species, we present the most comprehensive survey of the diversity of SVs and single nucleotide variants (SNVs) across the vertebrate tree of life to date.
Bio: Peter Sudmant is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Dr Sudmant completed his PhD at the University of Washington in the Lab of Dr Evan Eichler as HHMI International Fellow. Dr Sudmant went on to complete a postdoc with Christopher Burge at MIT as a Genentech fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. Dr Sudmant is a recipient of the American Foundation for Aging Research Junior Faculty Award and a Hellman Fellow.
Hosted by: Professor Russ Corbett-Detig, BME Department

Venezuela: Contradictions of Regime Change Without a Change of Regime, A Discussion with Dr. Gabriel Hetland
2026-02-26 12:00 - 13:30 | Stevenson Event Center, Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
*UPDATE!* New date! Now on Thursday, February 26th, 12- 1:30pm at the Stevenson Event Center.
Following the January 3 US attack and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has been transformed into something approaching a protectorate of the US. In this bizarre regime change without a change of regime, Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, is allied -under explicitly coercive threats- with Donald Trump in his brazenly neocolonial plunder of Venezuela’s oil resources. This talk will explore the political and economic contradictions of this dangerous and unusual situation, which poses grave risks to Venezuela, Latin America and the world.
Gabriel Hetland is associate professor of Africana, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at SUNY Albany and author of Democracy on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn.

Campus to Career: Job Talk with Fashion Reporter Elizabeth Segran
2026-02-26 13:00 - 13:45 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/campus-to-career-job-talk-with-fashion-reporter-elizabeth-segran/
Are you interested in writing, fashion, or sustainability? Join us for a job talk with Elizabeth Segran, a fashion reporter and author. Elizabeth will share insights from her career covering the intersection of fashion and sustainability, and she’ll tell us how her educational background in the humanities has shaped her trajectory and informed her work. If you’re curious about careers in the creative fields, this event is for you!
Register here
Attendees will be entered to win a raffle for two copies of Elizabeth’s book, The Rocket Years: How Your Twenties Launch the Rest of Your Life.
Learn more about Elizabeth:
Elizabeth Segran is senior staff writer at Fast Company, whose work has appeared in a range of publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Salon. Her book, The Rocket Years, was published in 2020 by Harper Books.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in the field of South and Southeast Asian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. She is an expert on India, having devoted a decade to studying its history, literature, culture and gender dynamics.
She is a global nomad who grew up in Brussels, Paris, Singapore, Jakarta and London before moving to New York to attend Columbia University. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her books, her husband and her two daughters.
This event is co-sponsored by Career Success, the Humanities Division, and the Arts Division.
This program is open to all students consistent with state and federal law, the UC Nondiscrimination Statement and the Nondiscrimination Policy Statement for University of California Publications Regarding Student-Related Matters.

Distinguished Teaching Award Lecture — Teaching Week 2026
2026-02-26 16:30 - 18:30 | Merrill Cultural Center, 200 McLaughlin Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Welcoming the Unknown Together
Join us as 2024-25 Distinguished Teaching Award recipient Laurie Palmer, Professor Emerita of Art, shares her insights on teaching. This lecture is one of the key events featured in Teaching Week 2026.
Artist, theorist, scholar, and activist, A. Laurie Palmer is Professor Emerita of Art. Since joining UCSC in 2015, she’s offered courses in sculpture, writing, forms and ideas, mixed media and project-based art, materiality of color, materiality of time, and environmental and racial justice. She has contributed significantly to establishing and guiding the Art Department’s Environmental Art and Social Practice graduate program during its first years. Before joining UCSC faculty, Palmer taught sculpture and contemporary theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 18 years. Her artwork has been shown nationally and internationally. She also lectures widely on her work, and publishes writing as, and about, art in multiple formats and forums.
Starting in 2018-2019, the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) recognizes outstanding teaching on our campus. This annual award is an opportunity to acknowledge the pedagogical contributions of our colleagues that include—but also go beyond—any one particular course. It seeks to recognize an instructor that has made significant contributions to educational equity within and beyond UC Santa Cruz.
Hybrid Event
Please register to attend in person or to stream via Vimeo
Learn more about the Distinguished Teaching Award

How promotions actually happen (and why hard work alone isn’t enough)
2026-02-26 17:30 - 18:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Most professionals are told a simple formula: work hard, deliver results, and your career will naturally advance. Yet many find that after years of strong performance, progress slows—responsibilities grow without recognition, and promotions go elsewhere.
The issue is rarely capability, but a misunderstanding of how advancement really works. Each career stage has different expectations: the skills that earn a first role aren’t the same ones that move someone into management or leadership. As organizations grow more complex—and AI makes execution easier to replicate—doing your job well is no longer enough. Advancement depends on how your work connects to the broader mission, how it’s perceived, and whether you’re already operating at the next level.
This session offers an inside look at why capable people plateau—and why others accelerate.
Bring your thoughts and experiences. This is a discussion-based workshop—please come ready to engage.
This event is part of the Dean Conversations: Pathways to professional success series.
Claim your seat!

Electroacoustic Performance and Artist Talk with the Whale Liberation Front
2026-02-26 18:00 - 19:30 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Experience a performance and talk by composers and sound artists Corey Diane and Peter J. Bowling, two members of the Whale Liberation Front.
The Intersections of Climate Change Series is organized with the Friedlaender Lab in conjunction with Weather and the Whale.
—
ADDITIONAL SERIES EVENTS
– Thurs. Feb. 5, 6:00 p.m: Intersections of Climate Change Lecture: Climate Justice and the Moss Landing Battery Fire
– Wed. Feb. 11, 6:00 p.m: The California Firefighter Cancer Research Study with Shehnaz Hussain and Fire Captain Jamie Gabriel
– Thurs. Feb. 26, 6:00 p.m: Intersections of Climate Change Performance: Electroacoustic Performance and Artist Talk with the Whale Liberation Front
– Wed. March 4, 6:00 p.m: Unexpected Returns: The Historic Entanglements of Fire, Settlement, and Stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains
—
ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
—
PARKING
– The entrance to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences Galleries is on Delaware Street and has an accessibility ramp.
– Convenient and free self-parking is available on Panetta Avenue and High Road, immediately adjacent to the galleries.
– Accessible parking is on High Road.
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Will Work for Food
2026-02-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us for a conversation on labor, food, and justice with Will Work for Food co-author Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and regional food production and service workers Veronica Rodriguez (Dole, Soledad), and X (Verve, Santa Cruz). Together, they will explore the often-overlooked role of labor in building a more just food system. Free and open to the public. Translation provided.

Semiconductor Career Summit - From Campus to Silicon Valley
2026-02-27 09:45 - 16:00 | Stevenson Event Center, Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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.
Come learn about careers in the semiconductor industry at the SEMI Professional Development Seminar hosted by UC Santa Cruz.

Listen to professionals in the industry talk about their roles and find out how to prepare for jobs in the Semiconductors Industry.
Discover semiconductor job opportunities you didn’t know existed (internship and entry-level) and how you can prepare for them through job searches, interviews, resumes, and more.
Meet with professionals and executives during our speed mentoring, mock interview, and networking sessions.

All majors are welcome! Students with a background in Engineering, Computer Science, Chemistry, Physics, Math, Data Science, and Business are strongly encouraged to attend.

Enjoy free food, free swag, and giveaways.
Students can come and go.

EVENT is FREE but registration is required. Register by Feb 20th to secure a lunch.
Event is organized by SEMI in collaboration with Career Success, Baskin Engineering and the Innovation & Business Engagement Hub.
You Belong Here: The programs and services described here 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.
Questions? Send to csuccess@ucsc.edu or visit Career Success at Hahn 125 East Entrance
Need accessibility support? Let us know at slugtalent@ucsc.edu at least two weeks prior to the event date.

"Career Success Resources" for UTC Transfer/Continuing Students
2026-02-27 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Come and find out ALL that Career Success has to offer to UCSC students – every resources is FREE for you! Resume/Cover Letter feedback, Career Coaching Appointments, Graduate School Preparation, Interviewing Skills, Networking Opportunities, Career Fairs, Professional Development Workshops and MORE!
All students are welcome. The presentation will last 30 minutes, followed by a 15-minute Q&A.
We will provide captions for the presentation. If you have disability-related needs, please contact the Career Success office at csuccess@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-4420 as soon as possible.

YOU BELONG HERE
Programs 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.

Education Innovation Workshop: Math Atlas
2026-02-28 09:00 - 15:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Welcome to The Math Altas!
In this one-day workshop, learning specialist Elizabeth Powell will be sharing her 35 years of experience as an educator in evidence-based strategies from The Math Atlas framework. We’ll talk about instructional effectiveness and learner engagement in one-on-one math settings.
You’ll get to evaluate the real-world implications of visual, verbal, and multi-sensory approaches to math instruction by reflecting on case examples and adapting them to the needs of individual learners and you’ll discover how The Math Atlas methods strengthen conceptual understanding and procedural fluency in mathematics.
This workshop is very welcoming to those who have struggled in math as well as those who love it!
Note: Teachers are welcome to attend, but we’ll be focusing on individualized instruction rather than classroom techniques.
Welcome to our immersive Education Innovation workshop series.
Join master educators to explore the most current, evidence-based best practices to keep your knowledge and skills up to date and to strengthen your ability to support every student. Each session is led by an expert in the field with real-world experience, who will guide you through the material and help you apply it immediately to your work. This workshop is sponsored by the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Educational Therapy certificate program.
Enroll today.

March is Hummingbird Month at the UCSC Arboretum & Botanic Garden
2026-03-01 00:00 - 2026-03-31 23:59 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
March is Hummingbird Month at the UCSC Arboretum & Botanic Garden
This 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.”
In 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.
We 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/
All events are free with paid admission: Adults: $10, Seniors $8 and Youth 4-17 $5. Current UCSC students are free. Rain cancels outdoor activities.
Current Arboretum members are always free and enjoy other great benefits year-round! Join Today at https://arboretum.ucsc.edu/get-involved/join-us/

Optional Practical Training (OPT) Awareness Week
2026-03-02 00:00 - 2026-03-06 23:59 | CA
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.
Visit our website to explore the different workshops and sessions.

ECE 290 Seminar: Precision Nuclear Medicine: Engineering Solutions from Acquisition to Analysis
2026-03-02 10:40 - 11:45 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Spencer L. Bowen, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Description: The Bowen Lab focuses on the development of tools for positron emission tomography (PET) and hybrid systems (e.g. PET/CT), to advance precision imaging for the care and study of oncology, neurology, and cardiology patients. Quantitative metrics from PET are integral to both patient workup and clinical research. However, current approaches to enable quantitative imaging have substantial performance limitations that can compromise study conclusions, fail to generalize across exams and scanners, expose patients to additional ionizing radiation, or necessitate invasive procedures. To address these key barriers, Dr. Bowen and his team investigate advanced acquisition techniques, image reconstruction algorithms, and post-processing methods. Their studies span from digital simulations to human subjects research. This lecture will cover recent developments by the Bowen Lab, including 1) advanced PET data correction methods for low-dose and standalone exams, 2) non-invasive fully quantitative imaging, and 3) leveraging topical sensors to detect faulty radiotracer injections.
Bio: Spencer L. Bowen, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He earned his doctorate in biomedical engineering from University of California, Davis, where he developed hardware and algorithmic solutions to enable quantification with a breast PET/CT scanner. Dr. Bowen then worked as a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital on precision PET imaging methods for combined PET/MR. Prior to joining the UT Southwestern faculty in 2020, he served as a research assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech-Carilion. Dr. Bowen’s research program is funded by both industry and the NIH. His work has been featured on the cover of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine and detailed by the press.
Hosted by: Professor Soumya Bose, ECE Department
Zoom Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97975378707?pwd=[REDACTED]

CM Seminar - "From Sibelius to Game: Crafting Adaptive Music for 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance'"
2026-03-02 12:30 - 13:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Presented by: Adam Sporka
Description: “This talk explores the technical and creative processes behind the music of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, where I served as a music programmer, and soundtrack contributor. Using our proprietary Sequence Music Engine and music logic module, we authentically scored the game’s 1400s Bohemia setting with segment-based adaptive music driven by in-game variables. Our workflow centers around the notation program Sibelius and our custom tool Converdi, which streamlines the production by converting the score symbols to preliminary MIDI streams per individual VSTs and by extracting the precise timing data necessary for the segment transitions. This enabled us to spend more time on the creative aspects of music and less time on production and implementation.”
The key takeaways from the talk are as follows:
* Production should start with a complete score, and not just the MIDI exports therefrom
* Custom automation tools can streamline the music creation workflow and reduce the production time
* Resequencing is more suitable for classical and medievalesque music than layering
* Rapid music prototyping allows for early testing of adaptive music directly in the game
Bio: Adam Sporka is a software developer by trade, a musician by domain, and a scientist by approach. As a researcher, developer, and educator in game audio, he places a special focus on interactive music. He has served as the technical music director for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (Warhorse Studios) and is the author of the Sequence Music Engine, a proprietary adaptive music middleware used in both games. As a composer, he contributed to the soundtrack of both Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, writing some of the most memorable medievalesque and early renaissance pieces on the soundtrack. Currently, he teaches game audio at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his Ph.D. and habilitation in human-computer interaction from the Czech Technical University (Czech Republic) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento (Italy). He has published more than 50 articles in the proceedings of international conferences and academic journals. Adam is currently appointed as a principal engineer at Embody, a Sunnyvale-based game audio software company focused on the commercial applications of the head-related transfer function.
Hosted by: Professor Christina Chung
When: March 2, 2026 from 12:30PM to 1:30PM
Location:
IN-PERSON @ SVC 3212.
Viewing room @ UCSC Main Campus, E2-280.
LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED AT BOTH LOCATIONS! Faculty and students are highly encouraged to attend.
Zoom info:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98763397019?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 987 6339 7019
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Statistics Seminar: Decoding Phytoplankton Responses to a Changing Ocean
2026-03-02 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Presenter: Francois Ribalet, Research Associate Professor, School of Oceanography, University of Washington
Description: François Ribalet will present new observational technologies and computational approaches for studying phytoplankton responses to ocean warming. Using SeaFlow, a custom-built automated flow cytometer deployed on over 100 research cruises, his team has collected nearly 850 billion cell measurements across global oceans. Matrix population models applied to these data reveal how temperature affects phytoplankton division rates and biomass. The research shows that Prochlorococcus, the ocean’s most abundant photosynthetic organism, experiences sharp declines in growth above 28°C. Climate projections incorporating these metabolic constraints predict a 40-60% decrease in Prochlorococcus production in tropical regions by 2100, with Synechococcus partially compensating through a 20-40% increase. These shifts between dominant phytoplankton groups will likely disrupt ocean food webs and carbon cycling, raising questions about whether tropical ecosystems can adapt to warming oceans.

Bio: François Ribalet is a research associate professor at the University of Washington studying phytoplankton and their role in ocean food webs and carbon cycling. He combines field observations with statistical models to understand how environmental changes affect the growth and community dynamics of these microscopic organisms.
Hosted by: Statistics Department

AM Seminar: The Evolving Landscape of AI for Science and Engineering: Bridging Simulation, Experiment, and Multi-scale Dynamics
2026-03-02 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Presenter: Aditi Krishnapriyan, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
Description: Recent advances in large-scale scientific datasets are creating new opportunities for machine learning (ML) methods to more effectively capture scientific phenomena with greater accuracy and reach. In this talk, I will discuss how these advances are both shifting ML design paradigms and enabling new scientific inquiries. This includes investigations into understanding if neural networks can autonomously discover fundamental physical relationships from data, and demonstrating how more flexible machine learning modeling design choices enable capturing physical dynamics across multiple scales. I will also explore how generative modeling approaches rooted in statistical physics can be applied to accelerate the sampling of dynamic pathways, and as a framework to align and bridge the gap between simulated data and experimental observations.
Bio: Aditi Krishnapriyan is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley where she is part of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Berkeley AI Research; as well as a faculty scientist in the Applied Mathematics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She holds a PhD from Stanford University, supported by the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, was the Luis W. Alvarez Fellow in Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and is a recipient of the Department of Energy Early Career Award and RCSA Scialog. Her research focuses on developing physics-inspired machine learning methods that bridge machine learning with physical science applications to capture phenomena across multiple length and timescales.
Hosted by: Applied Mathematics

CSE Colloquium - Improving Efficiency and Reliability of Foundation Models in Clinical AI
2026-03-04 11:00 - 12:15 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 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.
Bio:
Vasiliki 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.
Hosted by: Professor Nikos Tziavelis
Location: Engineering 2, E2-180 (*Refreshments such as coffee, tea, fresh fruit, and pastries will be provided)
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

Shields, S. (CM) - Procedural, Player-Centric Game Balancing
2026-03-04 13:00 - 17:00 | Merrill College, College Office, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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.
This 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.
Balance 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.
Event Host: Sam Shields, Ph.D. Candidate, Computational Media
Advisor: Edward F. Melcer
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98956788669?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 713173

Sonic Icons: Relation, Recognition, and Revival in a Syriac World
2026-03-04 15:30 - 17:00 | Social Sciences 1, Social Sciences 1, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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.
Coming 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.

Speaker 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.

The UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series presents: Unmasking cancer's complete genetic code
2026-03-04 17:30 - 19:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
In this Kraw lecture, Angela Brooks will discuss her work on cancer research.
Current 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.

In-Person Reception: 5:30 p.m.
Lecture: 6–7 p.m.

REGISTER

Unexpected Returns: The Historic Entanglements of Fire, Settlement, and Stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains
2026-03-04 18:00 - 19:30 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
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.

This event is part of Intersections of Climate Change, a series organized with the Friedlaender Lab in conjunction with Weather and the Whale.

ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
PARKING
– The entrance to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences Galleries is on Delaware Street and has an accessibility ramp.
– Convenient and free self-parking is available on Panetta Avenue and High Road, immediately adjacent to the galleries.
– Accessible parking is on High Road.
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

BME 280B Seminar: Artificial intelligence systems to advance engineered T cell immunotherapy designs
2026-03-05 11:40 - 13:15 | Biomedical Sciences, Biomedical Sciences Building Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Zinaida Good, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology and the Division of Computational Medicine, Stanford University
Description: T cell immunotherapies have reshaped the treatment landscape for hematologic malignancies and are rapidly extending to solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, and transplant tolerance. Yet durable benefit remains inconsistent, and toxicities remain clinically significant. The current discovery proceeds one edit at a time, and existing preclinical models do not represent patient biology, which often results in failure upon clinical translation. Overcoming these challenges to improve patient outcomes and reduce toxicities requires a systems-level understanding of the multiscale factors governing T cell function and toxicity in patients. Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches offer an exciting opportunity to tackle this problem by learning unified representations from diverse data types spanning molecular, cellular, and clinical modalities. I will provide an overview on our team’s approaches building AI systems that harness primary patient datasets to directly inform advanced T cell designs optimized for clinical outcomes, with validation in preclinical models.
Bio: Zinaida Good, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology and the Division of Computational Medicine at Stanford University. She also serves as the Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy Data Hub. The goal of her research program is to understand and enhance engineered T cell immunotherapies for cancer and immune-mediated diseases through innovative computational approaches and systems immunology. Her lab leverages innovation in machine learning and clinical multiomic datasets to build artificial intelligence systems for advanced T cell therapy design. Dr. Good earned her Ph.D. in Computational & Systems Immunology from Stanford University. Her work includes 4 first-author papers (Nature Medicine 2018 & 2022, Nature Biotechnology 2019, Trends in Immunology 2019), 18+ co-authored papers (including Nature 2019, 2022, 2024, Science 2021, Nature Methods 2016, 2022, and NEJM 2024), and an initial senior author papers (ICML 2025, NeurIPS 2025, Frontiers in Immunology 2025). Her research is supported by the NIH/NCI Pathway to Independence Award, NIH/OD Multimodal AI Initiative Award, NIH/NCI Program Project Grant, and the Weill Cancer Hub West. Dr. Good has been named an Arthur & Sandra Irving Cancer Immunology Fellow in 2022, Parker Bridge Fellow in 2023, and an AACR-Woman in Cancer Research Scholar in 2024.
Hosted by: Professor Vanessa Jonsson, BMEbe Department

Xu, Y. (CSE) - Right Place, Right Time: Accelerating Edge Computation on Modern Heterogeneous SoCs
2026-03-05 13:00 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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.
This 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.
It 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.
Event Host: Yanwen Xu, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Tyler Sorensen
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/5354629158?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 114514

Science in the Neighborhood: Transforming Pacific salmon recovery, from genes to ecosystems
2026-03-06 18:00 - 19:30 | Coastal Biology Building, 130 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Science In the Neighborhood
A public lecture series hosted quarterly by the UC Santa Cruz Science Division
Transforming Pacific salmon recovery, from genes to ecosystems
Presentation by Eric Palkovacs, Professor, UC Santa Cruz
Q&A with Bryan Gaensler, Dean of Science, UC Santa Cruz
Register here.
An endangered Central California Coast coho salmon from the Scott Creek recovery program that UCSC operates in collaboration with NOAA. Photo credit: Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark.
For millennia, Pacific salmon have been integral to the health of coastal ecosystems and human communities from California to Alaska. Salmon are ecological and cultural keystone species, connecting marine and freshwater food webs and supporting thriving fisheries. Yet, wild salmon have declined precipitously due to a combination of factors including dams, harvest, hatcheries, water use—and now, climate change.
Professor Palkovacs, who leads UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences and Fisheries Collaborative Program, will describe transformative approaches to recover wild salmon populations by connecting novel insights from the level of genes to ecosystems. Learn how this integrative research program can provide insights to transform the future for wild Pacific salmon and the ecosystems and fisheries they support.
The event is in-person only. Register here.
March 6, 2026 | 6:00–7:30 p.m.
Coastal Biology Building. Rm. 110
UC Santa Cruz Coastal Campus
130 McAllister Way
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
The screenshot below shows where to find the entrance of the Coastal Biology Building.

First Saturday Tour at the Arboretum
2026-03-07 11:00 - 12:00 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
First Saturday Tours are a wonderful way to introduce yourself to the Arboretum or to deepen your knowledge of the Arboretum’s plant collections. Each tour is a little different depending on the time of year, the interests of the tour guide, and the people who join in. For example, you might learn about the birds and mammals that make this land their home or about the amazing physical adaptations that plants have evolved to better deal with our extreme weather and climate conditions. Tours are free with paid admission.

Hendawy, M. (CM) - Autonoming Child Online Safety in the Age of AI: From Control to Digital Co-Agency Across Cultures
2026-03-09 07:00 - 08:00
Children’s lives are now inextricably linked with AI-driven digital systems that shape learning, social interaction, and development. This has elevated child online safety to a central concern for families, policymakers, and educators. This makes Child online safety a wicked socio-technical problem, emerging from the complex interplay of social norms, platform incentives, cultural expectations, and rapidly evolving technologies. Dominant control-based paradigms—monitoring, blocking, and surveillance—undermine children’s developmental capacity, erode family trust, and foreclose the iterative cycles of self regulated learning necessary for digital resilience. This proposal advances digital co-agency as a new paradigm for child online safety. It reframes safety from an outcome of unilateral control to a shared, relational practice distributed across children, caregivers, technologies, and governance structures. To be effective, digital co-agency must be grounded in a clear normative standard. I define this standard as ethical safety: protection is legitimate only when it is rights-respecting and developmentally supportive. Within this boundary, the dissertation proposes autonoming as a design stance for AI-mediated safety systems. Autonoming systems act as developmental mentors that support children’s judgment over time through explanation, negotiation, and graduated support that can fade as competence grows. Autonoming is grounded in Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) as the developmental mechanism for durable safety capacity. SRL models learning as cyclical forethought (planning), performance (in-the-moment regulation), and reflection (evaluating outcomes). The dissertation adopts a socio-technical interpretivist stance and a Design Science Research orientation to produce actionable artifacts that are theoretically grounded and evaluable.. Its core methodological contribution is localization-first comparative design across Cairo and Berlin. This comparative structure helps distinguish between: localized variables (culturally specific norms regarding authority, privacy, risk, norms, expectations, and legitimacy conditions that must be adapted to) from ethical invariants (accountability, contestability, proportionality that should hold across contexts).
Event Host: Mennatullah Hendawy, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media
Advisor: Magy Seif El-Nasr
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93831600031?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode-459844

Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data
2026-03-09 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
Presenter: Amanda Coston, Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley
Description: Performance evaluation plays a central role in decisions about whether and how predictive algorithms should be deployed in high-stakes settings. Yet, in many real-world domains, evaluation is fundamentally difficult: the data available for assessment are often biased, incomplete, or noisy, and the act of deploying a model can itself alter which outcomes are observed. As a result, standard evaluation practices may substantially misrepresent both overall model performance and disparities across groups. In this talk, we examine several common threats to valid evaluation—including measurement error, selection bias, and distribution shift—and present principled evaluation methods that enable valid performance assessment under these challenges when appropriate conditions are met.
Bio: From UC Berkeley website: Amanda Coston is an assistant professor of statistics at UC Berkeley. Her research addresses real-world data problems that challenge the validity, reliability, and equity of algorithmic decision support systems and data-driven policy-making. Her work draws on techniques from causal inference, machine learning, and nonparametric statistics. She earned her PhD in machine learning and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently completed a postdoc at Microsoft Research on the Machine Learning and Statistics Team. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Princeton in computer science and a certificate in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Hosted by: Statistics Department
