• Lucas, J. (BMEB) – Enabling Population-Scale Analysis of Human Centromere Diversity

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

    Centromeric DNA is critical for accurate chromosome segregation and genome stability, but due to its repetitive nature, it was only recently fully included in a human reference. Rapid evolution and sequence diversity in these regions limit the utility of one reference sequence, however. Integrating centromeric and pericentromeric satellite DNA – which together constitute over 5% […]

  • CSE Colloquium – Safety Alignment of LMs via Non-cooperative Games

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

    Presenter: Arman Zharmagambetov, Meta Abstract: Ensuring the safety of language models (LMs) while maintaining their usefulness remains a critical challenge in AI alignment. Current approaches rely on sequential adversarial training: generating adversarial (harmful) prompts and fine-tuning LMs to defend against them. We introduce a different paradigm: framing safety alignment as a non-zero-sum game between an […]

    Free
  • VMCC Talk with Salar Mameni—Blood of Tulips

    Porter College D-Building, Santa Cruz, CA

    What counts as life in the midst of war, genocide, and planetary destruction? What is death and how do ideas around martyrdom and sacrifice contribute to our understanding of sacred ecologies? In this talk, Mameni engages these questions based on research for his second book project focusing on ecologies of war and martyrdom in the […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • Tripoli: A Tale of Three Cities—reception, screening, and discussion with the filmmmaker

    Communications Building 7487 Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    While living abroad, a filmmaker returns to Tripoli, Lebanon, to confront a hometown that once rejected him as a queer child. With a microphone in hand, he walks around coffee shops, public squares, and a park to ask the city’s inhabitants about their cultural and social beliefs and their embrace of new ideas. Gradually, he […]

    FREE and open to UCSC affiliates
  • Annual BE Student Project Showcase

    The annual BE Student Project Showcase celebrates the innovative work and accomplishments of undergraduate engineers in capstone courses and research pathways.

  • BME 280B Seminar: Speaker Dylan Shropshire – “How did Wolbachia become Earth’s most pervasive animal symbiont?”

    Biomedical Sciences Building 575 McLaughlin Drive

    Presenter: Dylan Shropshire, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University Description: Maternally transmitted Wolbachia bacteria inhabit roughly half of all arthropod species, making them likely the most common animal-associated microbe on Earth. Wolbachia alter host reproduction, persist across deep evolutionary timescales, and move into new host species in ways that we are only beginning to resolve. Wolbachia’s […]

  • Something held by poetry

    Institute of the Arts and Sciences 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States

    In this intimate workshop, UC Santa Cruz students, faculty, and staff are invited into conversation with poets Ronaldo V. Wilson and Terri Witek. Something held by poetry is programmed for Wilson’s multimedia exhibition, there are no words, but melodies, currently on view at the IAS. RSVP is required. Ronaldo V. Wilson is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, […]

  • All This Safety is Killing Us w/ Aminah Elster, Jennifer James, and Carlos Martinez

    Visualizing Abolition
    Institute of the Arts and Sciences 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States

    Join us for a conversation between Black feminist abolitionist, advocate, and researcher Aminah Elster, Black Feminist scholar Jennifer James, UCSF, and public health and medical anthropology reseaarcher Carlos Martinez, ucsc,  on the intersection of prison abolition and healthcare. This conversation draws on research from the co-edited volume All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond […]

  • ECE Seminar: Advanced Sensing and AI Technologies for Food Safety and Precision Agriculture

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

    Presenter: Hamid Jafarbiglu, Agricultural Technology Evaluator, Big Idea Ventures Description: California agriculture is increasingly adopting organic and regenerative production systems, creating a growing need for technologies capable of monitoring complex agricultural environments, assessing food safety risks, and supporting data-driven management decisions. Emerging tools such as drones, hyperspectral scanning, environmental sensors, and artificial intelligence provide new […]

  • Harsh, B. (CSE) – SUPERSCALAR, MULTIPLE TAKEN BRANCH PREDICTOR

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

    This work addresses improvements in branch prediction mechanism to support high perfor- mance processors. The state of the art aims to balance the prediction latency and prediction accuracy using multi […]

  • Baskaran, D. (CM) – More than Just Fun: Exploring Meaningful Play, Communities of Play, and Relatedness of Play

    Virtual Event

    Play is often seen as a form of entertainment, leisure, or childhood development. However, it also acts as a meaningful experience that shapes how people connect with others and interact with the world around them throughout their lives. Prior work on meaningful play and communities of play has mainly focused on individual experiences and participation, […]

  • Tu, H. (CSE) – From Evaluation to Adaptation: Building Reliable Multimodal Intelligence

    Virtual Event

    Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are rapidly becoming general-purpose AI systems, yet their capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to evaluate, improve, and validate their reliability in realistic use. Standard benchmarks mainly measure in-distribution final-answer accuracy, leaving critical gaps in safety, robustness, fine-grained reasoning evaluation, and reliability in real-world agentic settings. My research proposes […]