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SUMMARY:2026 Right Livelihood International Conference
DESCRIPTION: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 practice and the Right Livelihood College as a steward of dialogue\, student voice\, and long-term institutional learning. \nRegistration is free and open to the public. Sign up to receive conference updates\, session links\, and participation opportunities.
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/2026-right-livelihood-international-conference/
LOCATION:
CATEGORIES:Film Screening,Lectures & Presentations,Meetings & Conferences,Ph.D. Presentations,Seminars,Social Gathering,Training,Undergraduate,Workshop
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260512T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260512T120000
DTSTAMP:20260512T012100
CREATED:20260421T160759Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260421T160759Z
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SUMMARY:Chen\, Q. (CSE) - New Approximation and Online Algorithms using Novel Combinatorial Structures
DESCRIPTION: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 are not able to afford to design new algorithms for each new problem via repeated trial and error. Therefore\, systematic ways to understand the possibilities and limitations of these problems are desired. This dissertation studies several central combinatorial optimization problems\, focusing on understanding the key structural obstacles and developing unified frameworks. Mainly\, we study two types of combinatorial optimization problems:\n(1) Scheduling. The problem is associated with limited resources\, and our target is to find an allocation method to complete all jobs over time that minimizes the overall budget cost.\n(2) Network Design. Different from scheduling problems. In this problem\, we aim to find a minimum-cost topological network that supports routing for demanding communications. \nOur first work is focused on a group-to-group survivable network design problem that generalizes the classic point-to-point network to support routing between any pair of subsets of nodes. Previous research stops at limited faults\, and the difficulty comes from the way to compress the graph into a tree. We propose a new framework via capacitated tree embeddings against arbitrary faults in the network\, which gives the first polylogarithmic approximation algorithm. Further\, this framework captures nearly all the recent models proposed in the area. \nIn contrast to the offline optimization problems mentioned above\, online algorithms are natural adaptations that have been found in tremendous real applications. In online algorithms\, the algorithm wants to compete against arbitrary uncertainty\, which means the instance is unknown at first and revealed over time. We study various scheduling problems and focus on some important metrics – average flow time\, which measures the average time a job stays in the system from its arrival to completion. Real-world demands give online scheduling problems enormously different settings. Computer scientists need to repeat errors and trials to find a provably good solution. We find the key required combinatorial property is supermodularity for the residual objective\, which measures the average completion time for all alive jobs assuming they have the same arrival time. Further\, we relate supermodularity with gross-substitute/linear-substitute (GS/LS)\, which is a well-studied definition in economics. Finally\, we propose a meta-algorithm that solves all captured problems in one shot. In the end\, we revisit the proportional fairness (PF) algorithm for $L_p$-norms of flow time. By reinterpreting the previous potential function and the corresponding Fisher market\, we show that PF is competitive. \n  \nEvent Host: Qingyun Chen\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science & Engineering  \nAdvisor: Sungjin Im \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/92628493495?pwd=iJq8YwarrYyofPLF4AmZpwzsZnLyvt.1 \n 
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/chen-q-cse-new-approximation-and-online-algorithms-using-novel-combinatorial-structures-2/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T070000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T090000
DTSTAMP:20260512T012100
CREATED:20260421T181155Z
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SUMMARY:Ehrlich\, D. (CM) - Designing Open Microscopy Tools for Neuroscience Research
DESCRIPTION:Advances in microscopy have transformed our understanding of biological systems\,\nyet the high cost and limited accessibility of commercial imaging platforms continue to re-\nstrict their use in many research settings. This thesis presents the design and development of\nopen hardware microscopy tools for neuroscience research\, with a focus on integrating user-\ncentered design principles into the instrument development process. Two primary methods\nare introduced: augmenting existing microscopes with new imaging capabilities\, and the cre-\nation of modular microscopes that are designed for continuous\, long-term live-cell imaging.\nBoth platforms are built around open hardware principles\, prioritizing low cost\, modularity\, and\nadaptability to the practical needs of working researchers. Alongside the hardware contribu-\ntions\, this thesis presents user experience research methods for examining how neuroscience\nresearchers interact with novel microscopy technologies\, providing a methodological frame-\nwork for human-centered scientific instrument design. These contributions demonstrate that\npairing hardware development with user-centered design methodologies produces microscopy\ntools that are both technically capable and meaningfully accessible to both laboratories and\nindividuals studying neuroscience\, education\, and other fields. \n  \nEvent Host: Drew Ehrlich\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computational Media  \nAdvisor: Sri Kurniawan \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/2491739056?pwd=UCt3MmZmL1hwdXcvVGNNaGRQM0lDQT09
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/ehrlich-d-cm-designing-open-microscopy-tools-for-neuroscience-research/
LOCATION:
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T130000
DTSTAMP:20260512T012100
CREATED:20260508T180004Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260508T180004Z
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SUMMARY:Between Forest and City: Stable Isotope Evidence for Anthropogenic Impacts on the Dietary Ecology of the Vulnerable Wied’s Marmosets in Brazil
DESCRIPTION:Archaeology and Biological Anthropology Lunch Talk with Letícia Soto da Costa — May 13th at 12 noon in Rm 261\, Social Sciences 1. \nAbout the talk: Anthropogenic disturbance is a major driver of environmental change\, altering resource availability and the feeding ecology of primates\, particularly in rapidly changing tropical landscapes. The vulnerable Wied’s marmoset (Callithrix kuhlii)\, endemic to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest\, inhabits increasingly human-modified environments. However\, how these changes affect its feeding ecology remains understood. Here\, we used carbon (d13C) and nitrogen (d15N) stable isotope analyses to investigate the dietary ecology of free-ranging Wied’s marmoset populations across 14 municipalities representing a gradient of human-modified landscapes in southern Bahia\, Brazil. We analyzed hair samples from 107 individuals across 30 social groups\, alongside isotopic data from potential dietary resources. Our findings reveal that both d13C and d15N values were negatively associated with forest cover\, with individuals in less forested sites exhibiting higher isotopic values. While mixing models indicated that fruit and insects were the main dietary components\, although their relative contributions varied spatially. Populations in more forested sites showed higher fruit consumption\, whereas those in less forested areas relied more heavily on insects and potentially additional\, unaccounted food resources. We also found age-related differences in d13C values\, suggesting variation in resource use across life stages. These findings indicate that C. kuhlii exhibits dietary flexibility in response to human-modified landscapes and resource availability\, while highlighting the importance of forest cover in maintaining natural feeding patterns. \nAbout the presenter: Letícia Soto da Costa is a PhD student in Ecology and Conservation Biology at the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (Bahia\, Brazil)\, under the supervision of Dr. Ricardo S. Bovendorp. Her research focuses on the impacts of anthropogenic pollutants on Wied’s Marmosets (Callithrix kuhlii) in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest of Bahia through heavy metal and stable isotope analysis. During AY 2025-26\, she has been a Visiting Researcher in the PEMA Lab under the mentorship of Prof. Vicky Oelze and funded by the Brazilian government as a CAPES Visiting PhD Scholar.
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/between-forest-and-city-stable-isotope-evidence-for-anthropogenic-impacts-on-the-dietary-ecology-of-the-vulnerable-wieds-marmosets-in-brazil/
LOCATION:Social Sciences 1\, Social Sciences 1\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Lectures & Presentations,Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T170000
DTSTAMP:20260512T012100
CREATED:20260501T203636Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260501T203636Z
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SUMMARY:Zheng\, K. (CSE) - Towards Generalist Embodied World Models: From Neuro-Symbolic Interaction to Self-Evolving 3D World Generation
DESCRIPTION: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 construct spatially consistent 3D worlds from limited observations. Across embodied reasoning\, multimodal generation\, and 3D world construction\, this dissertation develops methods that combine pretrained models with structured interfaces such as symbolic reasoning\, generative visual tokens\, spatial priors\, and iterative self-refinement. These approaches aim to improve generalization\, data efficiency\, interpretability\, and geometric consistency without relying solely on monolithic end-to-end training. Together\, the work argues for a broader view of embodied AI: intelligent systems should not only recognize or describe the world\, but also act within it\, imagine it\, and build reusable representations of it. \nEvent Host: Kaizhi Zheng\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science & Engineering  \nAdvisor: Xin Eric Wang \n  \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/91912825272?pwd=aps1YHcJKMaqmhtgl72f51K9EbxrHt.1 \nPasscode: 991132
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/zheng-k-cse-towards-generalist-embodied-world-models-from-neuro-symbolic-interaction-to-self-evolving-3d-world-generation/
LOCATION:
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260514T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260514T110000
DTSTAMP:20260512T012100
CREATED:20260427T162713Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260427T162920Z
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SUMMARY:Shadmon\, R. (CS) - Proximal Byzantine Agreement
DESCRIPTION:Research on fault-tolerance protocols for approximate Byzantine agreement\n(ABA) has largely focused on ensuring that distributed processes remain\nconsistent despite fewer than 1/3 faulty processes. Yet in many\nreal systems\, consistency is only useful when it enables processes to\nmake accurate decisions from replicated\, noisy\, and potentially\nadversarially corrupted data relative to an ideal fault-free baseline.\nThis limitation is increasingly important in edge applications such as\nautonomous vehicles\, drone networks\, smart cities\, manufacturing\, and\nsensor-based systems\, where agreement directly drives downstream\nactions. At the same time\, many existing ABA protocols impose\nimpractical requirements\, such as replica counts that grow with data\ndimensionality or prior knowledge of the maximum distance between values\nproposed by each process. \nWe introduce Stochastic Byzantine Agreement (SBA)\, a new problem\nformulation in which the goal is to estimate an output from n replicated\nvalues consisting of n-f nonfaulty outputs generated by an\nunderlying stochastic process and f arbitrarily chosen\nByzantine outputs. We then present Proximal Byzantine Agreement\n(PBA)\, a stochastic agreement protocol that solves SBA by enabling\nconsumers to infer the most likely ideal output conditioned on the\noutputs they receive. In addition\, PBA provides a region\nguarantee that\, as we prove\, always contains the corresponding\nfault-free stochastic estimate of the true value. \nWe describe the design of PBA\, formalize its guarantees\, and evaluate\nits accuracy against existing techniques using stochastic simulations\nacross symmetric and asymmetric distributions and multiple system\nconfigurations. We also evaluate runtime overhead and performance in a\nfollow-the-leader drone network simulator and in a Java implementation on\nRaspberry Pis using a real-world adaptive cruise control dataset. Our\nresults show that PBA performs competitively across all evaluated\nsettings and especially well under simulated Byzantine attack. Most\nnotably\, PBA maintains stable accuracy as dimensionality increases\,\noutperforming methods that require up to 10x more replicas}\nand incur up to 10x greater computation time per agreement\ndecision. \nEvent Host: Roy Shadmon\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science  \nAdvisor: Owen Arden \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98390167664?pwd=DwkNuUSRaZRKXYb7pQbDYXgf7HFFPg.1 \nPasscode: pba
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/shadmon-r-cs-proximal-byzantine-agreement/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T100000
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CREATED:20260422T160446Z
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SUMMARY:Maram\, S. (CM) - Scripture To Console: The Nexus between Religion and Digital Play
DESCRIPTION: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 video games\, demonstrating the influence of religion on video games\, the influence of video games on religion\, and finally\, how these two powerful mobilization forces can come together to solve global challenges. \nFirst\, I examine the current landscape of religious representation in commercial video games (e.g.\, Assassin’s Creed\, SMITE). I analyze how key stakeholders i.e. players\, game designers\, and development studios\, interpret and engage with embedded religious elements\, drawing on existing critical reception and player discourse. This analysis identifies common narrative pitfalls and successful strategies for incorporating complex religious themes in digital spaces\, culminating in proposed design frameworks for sensitive and effective representation. \nBuilding on this foundational work\, the thesis culminates in defining and validating a new interaction paradigm where learning meets religion through play. This paradigm focuses on intentionally leveraging religious content i.e. specifically its rituals and narratives as mechanics in serious games to drive motivation and learning toward collective action. I validate this paradigm through a comprehensive case study focused on climate change\, arguably the most pressing issue of the modern era. This involves the design and empirical discussion of a serious game that incorporates specific religious mechanics\, ethics\, and narratives (e.g.\, stewardship\, ritual) to effectively communicate the severity of the climate crisis and motivate stakeholders toward a collective solution. \n  \nEvent Host: Sai Siddartha Maram\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computational Media \nAdvisor: Magy Seif El-Nasr \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/91946426300?pwd=wxe1x3YCRsXrtcvOSy2kmfC9dZ3inW.1 \nPasscode: 558570
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/maram-s-cm-scripture-to-console-the-nexus-between-religion-and-digital-play/
LOCATION:
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T110000
DTSTAMP:20260512T012100
CREATED:20260507T160500Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260507T160500Z
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SUMMARY:Lucas\, J. (BMEB) - Enabling Population-Scale Analysis of Human Centromere Diversity
DESCRIPTION: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% of the human genome – into genetic research requires access to diverse sequences and the variation between them. The HPRC’s Release 2 dataset\, together with recent advancements in long-read assembly algorithms and new tools for sequence alignment and annotation\, now make characterization of centromeric variation possible. In this proposal\, I outline my work as part of the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC) to create a diverse set of reference assemblies that accurately represent centromeric variation (aim 1)\, use novel tooling to characterize variation in centromeric regions (aim 2)\, and define the mutational processes that drive centromere evolution (aim 3). Completion of these aims will create a resource to enable the analysis and interpretation of centromeric variation data\, bringing these historically inaccessible regions into mainstream studies of human genetics\, evolution\, and disease. \nEvent Host: Julian Lucas\, Ph.D. Student\, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics \nAdvisor: Karen Miga \nZoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94129246296?pwd=QAs2hW8QZRNgpfaGJXvmaVfo52tIh7.1 \nPasscode: 669318
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/lucas-j-bmeb-enabling-population-scale-analysis-of-human-centromere-diversity/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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