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SUMMARY:Xie\, Y. (CM) - Crop Circles of Play: Forces and Formation in the Dyadic Magic Circle
DESCRIPTION:Cooperative two-player play produces distinctive social experiences between players: intimacy\, trust\, cooperation\, communitas. Since Huizinga\, the frame within which these experiences arise has been called the Magic Circle: a temporarily-set-apart space through which play does its social work. It has been a central organizing concept across game studies\, performance theory\, and HCI because it points to a basic human capacity: the way play transforms activity that\, on its own\, would mean nothing into shared experiences of intimacy\, trust\, and communitas. Yet a century on\, after generations of theoretical elaboration and equally vigorous contestation\, the Magic Circle remains theoretically rich but empirically elusive\, invoked by Huizinga\, Goffman\, Stenros\, and others but never located in observable interaction. Locating it empirically would let us observe what shapes any given Magic Circle and how that shape develops over the course of play: the game itself\, each player’s prior experience with games and streams\, the histories they bring to each other\, and whatever else is pressing on the shared frame. It would help explain why two dyads playing the same game produce different experiences\, a particular concern for educational games\, serious games\, and art games that aim to deliver a specific message or outcome to players. This proposal argues that the dyadic Magic Circle becomes observable when two players meet over a shared game and must negotiate their individual senses of “what this play is” into a shared frame. It treats this negotiated frame as a Crop Circle: a pattern pressed into recorded interaction by forces (player pulls\, designer prescriptions\, external audiences)\, reconstructable through close multimodal reading. The proposal therefore asks: where\, in the recorded interaction of dyadic play\, can the negotiated Magic Circle be caught taking shape\, and what does its observable form reveal about how a designed game becomes a lived experience between two people? \nThis proposal examines the dyadic Magic Circle through five connected studies. Study 1 conducts a PRISMA systematic review of two-player game scholarship in the ACM Digital Library\, showing that the field has already documented Magic Circle phenomena and closely related interactional dynamics without naming them as such. Study 2 applies Interaction Analysis (Jordan and Henderson\, 1995) to publicly available stream footage of two-player cooperative gameplay performed for an external audience. Study 3 conducts a controlled lab study of dyadic cooperative gameplay\, using multimodal recording and post-session stimulated recall to capture the negotiated Magic Circle under private play conditions. Study 4 conducts a comparative reading of the Study 2 and Study 3 corpora to examine how the audience-versus-private frame\, as an external force\, imprints on the dyadic Magic Circle. Finally\, Study 5 reads across Studies 1-4 to identify what gives the Magic Circle its “magic”: the configurations of force and trace that produce the distinctive social experiences a century of play scholarship has been chasing\, and to articulate “design for the Magic Circle\, not for the experience” as a generative principle for cooperative game design. \nEvent Host: Yi Xie\, Ph.D. Student\, Computational Media \nAdvisor: Elin Carstensdottir \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94258671135?pwd=qEkTZAQKI5avLf060hOycY1hgER2tX.1 \nPasscode: 650205
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/xie-y-cm-crop-circles-of-play-forces-and-formation-in-the-dyadic-magic-circle/
LOCATION:
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260604T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260604T120000
DTSTAMP:20260601T103839
CREATED:20260512T161057Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260512T171434Z
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SUMMARY:Kordonowy\, S. (CS) - The Role of Circuits in Near-Term Quantum Computation
DESCRIPTION:As quantum computing transitions from theory to practice\, understanding which algorithms suit near-term devices becomes critical. Current quantum computers are severely constrained by limited qubit counts\, short coherence times\, and high error rates that quickly degrade computation into noise. This thesis addresses two interconnected questions: what non-trivial computational tasks can near-term devices execute and how should algorithms be implemented to exploit available hardware? We examine circuit design as the bridge between these concerns\, analyzing how gate choices determine algorithmic efficiency and computational hardness. By deriving explicit circuit constructions\, we obtain tangible cost estimates for practical quantum computation\, enabling precise comparisons to classical approaches and identification of break-even points in system size and error rates. Understanding these trade-offs is essential for near-term quantum computing\, where experiments are expensive and error-prone. \nWe apply these ideas to three domains:\n1. Streaming: we provide circuit implementations for the Boolean Hidden Matching problem\, a combinatorial problem which exhibits exponential space separation compared to classical algorithms. We give explicit resource estimates and experimentally validate on Quantinuum’s trapped-ion hardware. We demonstrate that quantum advantage persists even when accounting for error correction overhead. \n2. Variational eigensolving: We examine how gate set choices influence trainability of variational quantum eigensolvers and provide Lie algebraic decompositions for differing gate sets. These decompositions are in turn used as a warm-starting heuristic to overcome barren plateaus\, a common problem in quantum machine learning tasks\, and improve convergence. We apply this technique to three combinatorial problems with primary focus on portfolio optimization. \n3. Cryptography: We develop a digital signature scheme based on circuit learning hardness and classical shadows. Error detection plays a direct role in the circuits considered\, with a focus on practical implementation for near-term devices. \nThese case studies demonstrate how careful circuit design can either mitigate near-term\nconstraints or expose where error correction becomes necessary to achieve quantum\nadvantage. \n  \nEvent Host: Steven Kordonowy\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science  \nAdvisor: Alexandra Kolla  \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/9524731001?pwd=MzdrNmhidVBsTXNFbktBcjEvNmZIQT09&omn=96338496668  \nPasscode: J29XGi \n  \n 
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/kordonowy-s-cs-the-role-of-circuits-in-near-term-quantum-computation/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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SUMMARY:Okamoto\, F. (BMEB) - Improving read-to-pangenome alignment in complicated genomic regions
DESCRIPTION:Many genetics pipelines start by aligning sequencing reads to a reference genome. Aligners attempt to find the position in the reference sequence which best matches the read sequence\, but this breaks down when the reads come from a sample with variation relative to the reference. A proposed alternative\, pangenome graphs\, is supposed to fix such “reference bias” by including known variation within the reference itself. Yet read alignment is still difficult in graph regions featuring certain complex variation. I will address specific known limitations of pangenome read alignment by developing better methods to align reads to pangenomes (1) in centromeres\, (2) in regions with cycles\, (3) when a “split”/supplementary alignment is required\, and (4) for RNA-seq reads. \nEvent Host: Faith Okamoto\, Ph.D. Student\, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics \nAdvisor: Benedict Paten \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/3543092299?pwd=5xbPfPhxvoJlx24tusiOwPuLSjzwzb.1 \nPasscode: 767376
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/okamoto-f-bmeb-improving-read-to-pangenome-alignment-in-complicated-genomic-regions/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260604T130000
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SUMMARY:Lietz\, R. (CM) - Reflecting on Failure: Designing and Evaluating Archetype Profiles as a Tool for Self-Reflection
DESCRIPTION:Self-reflection holds significant potential for learning\, behavior change\, and emotional processing\, yet designing technologies that effectively support it remains challenging\, particularly when reflection involves difficult experiences such as failure. Most current technologies avoid negative experiences altogether\, leaving users without support at precisely the moments when reflection could be most valuable.\nThis dissertation investigates how technology can better support self-reflection through three mixed-methods studies. The first examines how people experience and reflect on failure\, revealing how identity\, self-blame\, and emotional avoidance create barriers to productive reflection. These findings informed an iterative design process through which archetype profiles emerged as a promising reflective format. The second study evaluated archetype profiles against standard graph-based visualizations\, finding that the quiz-profile sequence effectively scaffolded reflection by supporting emotional re-engagement followed by cognitive reframing. The third study extended this work into a collaborative context\, examining archetype profiles derived from sleep tracking data as shareable artifacts for social reflection. Across these studies\, this dissertation contributes empirical insights into reflection on failure and design knowledge about archetype profiles as a reflective format. \nEvent Host: Rebecca Lietz\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computational Media \nAdvisor: Steve Whittaker \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/7855885795?pwd=RS9mWXhQOXNyNmRVSzQrd1MzamJVQT09 \nPasscode: 172404
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/lietz-r-cm-reflecting-on-failure-designing-and-evaluating-archetype-profiles-as-a-tool-for-self-reflection/
LOCATION:Silicon Valley Campus\, 3175 Bowers Avenue\, Santa Clara\, CA\, 95054\, United States
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260604T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260604T153000
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SUMMARY:Imlau Dagostini\, J. (CSE) - Intent-Driven Orchestration for Scientific Computing
DESCRIPTION:The growing complexity of high-performance computing (HPC) systems poses a fundamental challenge for domain scientists\, whose primary objective is to obtain scientifically valid results rather than to optimize resource utilization. Modern leadership-class facilities combine heterogeneous CPUs\, GPUs\, and specialized accelerators across systems that simultaneously support traditional scientific simulations and AI-driven workloads. This creates a vast\, machine-dependent configuration space that even experienced systems researchers find difficult to navigate. In practice\, users must explicitly specify resources\, node counts\, and walltime estimates before submitting jobs to an orchestrator\, resulting in iterative trial-and-error that wastes both human effort and compute resources. \nThis thesis proposes an intent-driven orchestration middleware for scientific computing\, in which domain scientists express high-level computational goals rather than low-level resource parameters\, and the system assumes responsibility for identifying configurations that satisfy those goals efficiently. This thesis proposal builds on a completed study of the computational performance of pangenome mapping\, a representative workload of data-intensive pipelines increasingly common in modern science. We demonstrate that tailoring tuning parameters to specific inputs and architectures yields significant performance improvements while exposing the depth of the configuration search problem that motivates this thesis. We then present an in-progress user-aware\, intent-driven middleware that uses surrogate models to aid this exploration and map high-level goals to suitable configurations. We end this presentation by proposing a cluster-aware orchestrator that enables existing HPC resource managers to support intent-aware decision-making. \nEvent Host: Jessica Imlau Dagostini\, Ph.D. Student\, Computer Science & Engineering \nAdvisor: Abel Souza \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93851280425?pwd=v4ONi9N5UlfZmsMqiI4gSkxFXe0oaX.1 \nPasscode: 835985 \n 
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/imlau-dagostini-j-cse-intent-driven-orchestration-for-scientific-computing/
LOCATION:Jack Baskin Engineering\, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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