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  • Fredrickson, K. (CSE) – Practical Anonymity with Formal Resistance to Traffic Analysis

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

    Anonymous communication systems hide who is talking to whom, not just what is said. However, existing systems are either vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks–attacks where adversaries observe and correlate the network traffic of users–or are forced to rely on unrealistic and unenforceable assumptions about how users behave. Worse, existing theory lacks tools to rigorously model […]

  • Liu, C. (CSE) – Enabling LLM Unlearning at Inference Time by Decomposing Detection and Intervention

    Virtual Event

    Machine unlearning addresses the “right to be forgotten” under GDPR and enables privacy, copyright, and safety compliance in large language models. Training-based unlearning can remove targeted behavior on benchmarks, but it scales poorly, can degrade utility, and can fail under adversarial prompting that recovers supposedly forgotten content. This prospectus proposes inference-time behavioral unlearning: rather than […]

  • Shields, S. (CM) – Procedural, Player-Centric Game Balancing

    Merrill College College Office, Santa Cruz, CA
    Hybrid Event

    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, […]

  • Xu, Y. (CSE) – Right Place, Right Time: Accelerating Edge Computation on Modern Heterogeneous SoCs

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

    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 […]

  • Harrison, D. (CS) – Multi-Level Control in Neural Dialogue Generation: Style, Semantics, and Selection through Over-Generation and Ranking

    End-to-end neural generation models have largely displaced the modular architectures that once gave dialogue system designers explicit control over what is said and how it is said. While these models produce fluent text, they collapse content planning, sentence planning, and surface realization into a single undifferentiated decoding step, sacrificing the controllable structure that earlier systems […]

  • Fan, Y. (CSE) – Building Human-Centered Multimodal AI Agents

    Virtual Event

    As multimodal artificial intelligence systems become increasingly embedded in everyday technology, there is a growing need to design human-centered AI agents that support and amplify human capabilities rather than replace them. This dissertation investigates how to build human-centered multimodal AI agents, framing human-centeredness as an agent-level objective that requires both accessible, assistive interaction and reliable, […]

  • Moghadam, M. (CE) – Constraint-Aware Scene Understanding and Trajectory Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

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

    Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are commonly organized as modular pipelines that transform raw sensor measurements into low-level actuation commands through perception, planning, and control. While learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in perception and environment modeling, the planning layer remains a key bottleneck for reliable autonomy. Highway driving in particular requires long-horizon reasoning and socially […]

  • Wang, H. (CSE) – Accelerating RTL Simulation with Specialized Graph Partitioners

    Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Register transfer level (RTL) simulation is an invaluable tool for developing, debugging, verifying, and validating hardware designs. However, the performance of RTL simulation has long been a limiting factor in industry. Despite the inherent parallelism of hardware, current RTL simulators have not achieved practical performance gains due to fundamental challenges in communication, synchronization, memory bandwidth, […]

  • Teng, Z. (CM) – Visualizing Player Processes: Towards Design Guidelines for Interactive Process Visualization Tools in Game Analytics

    Virtual Event

    Game analysts face a significant challenge in understanding problem-solving and decision-making processes from the vast and complex sequential data generated by modern video games. Existing visualization tools often fail to adequately support the exploration, suffering from issues of visual clutter, inflexible cohort construction, and a lack of interactive depth. To address this gap, this dissertation […]

  • Ticknor, B. (STAT) – Clustering and Tractable Multivariate Inference for Extremes

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

    Modeling environmental extremes often involves large collections of spatial or temporal records where both clustering similar series and modeling dependence among extremes are challenging tasks. This Ph.D. proposal addresses several related problems in extreme value analysis. In particular, we study how to cluster many time series based on their extremal behavior using strategies defined via […]

  • world map with dot connectors

    2026 Right Livelihood International Conference

    Hybrid Event

    The Right Livelihood International Conference is a four-week global conference exploring how education can strengthen democracy, collective intelligence, and just futures. Bringing together Right Livelihood Laureates, students, faculty, and community partners […]

  • Castello, J. (CSE) – Space Mission Simulation From the Outside In

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

    Robotic space missions often use discrete event simulation to reduce risk in operation. A simulation applies a set of planned activities to a model of mission resources, and the model’s […]

  • Abstract digital illustration featuring gears and interconnected technology elements.

    Mirchandani, C. (BMEB) – Population and Evolutionary Genomics Across Ecological Scales

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

    Sequencing technologies have transformed population and evolutionary genetics, making it possible to ask questions at scales that were intractable a decade ago. Realizing that potential depends on tailored computational approaches, and on the tools and infrastructure those approaches are built on. My dissertation works across this spectrum. Using an in vitro Drosophila cell culture system, […]

  • Pawl, E. (STAT) – Flexible and Scalable Mixtures of Experts for Oceanographic Flow Cytometry Data

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

    Flow cytometry is a valuable technique in microbial research used to measure the optical properties of single-celled organisms at high throughput. Oceanographers often deploy flow cytometers on research cruises in order to study the characteristics of phytosynthetic microbes—called phytoplankton—in regions and times with diverse environmental conditions. Because cytometers cannot distinguish between subpopulations, researchers typically cluster […]

  • Close-up abstract image of a circuit board with glowing lines and interconnected pathways.

    Zheng, Z. (STATS) – Semi-Supervised Statistical Learning for Oceanographic Data

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

    Oceanographic data, generated by modern technologies that measure biological systems across time, space, and cell populations, are often rich, high-dimensional, and highly heterogeneous. Such data provide valuable opportunities to study subcellular organization, cellular heterogeneity, and dynamic biological processes in marine environments. However, because marine plankton systems remain relatively understudied and less well characterized than many […]