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    2026 Right Livelihood International Conference

    Hybrid Event

    The Right Livelihood International Conference is a five-week global conference exploring how education can strengthen democracy, collective intelligence, and just futures. Bringing together Right Livelihood Laureates, students, faculty, and community partners across continents, the conference combines asynchronous learning with participatory dialogue and collaborative action. Rather than advocating specific outcomes, the conference positions education as a democratic […]

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    Johns, M. (CMPM) – Playing Together in a Co-Designed Future: Building Resilience Through Community-Centered Gameful Design

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

    Complex societal problems (e.g. wicked problems) such as those brought on by climate change can be addressed through a combination of Research through Design (RtD), co-design, and Serious Games (SG) by inviting affected communities to take part in developing iterative, experimental solutions and exploring their potential impact. In the course of my research, I have […]

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    Chen, Q. (CSE) – New Approximation and Online Algorithms using Novel Combinatorial Structures

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

    Most optimization problems face the challenge of computing an optimum solution requiring superpolynomial time. In particular, they are classified as NP-hard problems that have no polynomial-time algorithm to date. Instead, computer scientists turn to find an approximate solution and create numerous elegant algorithms. However, in the modern era, computational environments have changed drastically, and we […]

  • Marmoset in Brazil

    Between Forest and City: Stable Isotope Evidence for Anthropogenic Impacts on the Dietary Ecology of the Vulnerable Wied’s Marmosets in Brazil

    Social Sciences 1 Social Sciences 1, Santa Cruz, CA

    Please join us for an Archaeology/Biological Anthropology Lunch Talk on May 13th at noon in SocSci1, Rm 261. Visiting PhD scholar Letícia Soto da Costa will present “Between Forest and City: Stable Isotope Evidence for Anthropogenic Impacts on the Dietary Ecology of the Vulnerable Wied’s Marmosets in Brazil.”

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    Ehrlich, D. (CM) – Designing Open Microscopy Tools for Neuroscience Research

    Virtual Event

    Advances in microscopy have transformed our understanding of biological systems, yet the high cost and limited accessibility of commercial imaging platforms continue to re- strict their use in many research settings. This thesis presents the design and development of open hardware microscopy tools for neuroscience research, with a focus on integrating user- centered design principles […]

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    Zheng, K. (CSE) – Towards Generalist Embodied World Models: From Neuro-Symbolic Interaction to Self-Evolving 3D World Generation

    Virtual Event

    Artificial intelligence is moving beyond passive perception toward systems that can understand, interact with, and generate the world. This dissertation studies generalist embodied world models that connect language, vision, action, and 3D scene representations. It explores how multimodal systems can ground human instructions in physical environments, reason over long-horizon tasks, generate coherent text-and-visual content, and […]

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    Shadmon, R. (CS) – Proximal Byzantine Agreement

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

    Research on fault-tolerance protocols for approximate Byzantine agreement (ABA) has largely focused on ensuring that distributed processes remain consistent despite fewer than 1/3 faulty processes. Yet in many real systems, consistency is only useful when it enables processes to make accurate decisions from replicated, noisy, and potentially adversarially corrupted data relative to an ideal fault-free […]

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    Maram, S. (CM) – Scripture To Console: The Nexus between Religion and Digital Play

    Virtual Event

    Religion has historically been a profound force for global mobilization, shaping geopolitics, economies, and geography. Similarly, contemporary interactive media, with video games at the forefront, has moved beyond mere entertainment to become a powerful vehicle for communication, narrative, and inspiration, reaching millions worldwide. This dissertation investigates the intersection of these two influential forces: religion and […]

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    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% […]