Intracellular symbionts are microorganisms, such as bacteria, that live within host cells. These associations are widespread throughout the invertebrate tree of life, and can perform a diversity of key metabolic, […]
This event celebrates and highlights the work of UCSC graduate students in all academic divisions. Enrolled graduate students will present either a poster, talk, or mixed media presentation. Judges will […]
Centromeres ensure proper chromosome segregation during cell division, yet the organization and regulation of centromeric chromatin within satellite DNA arrays remain incompletely understood. Here, we leverage the complete diploid human […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. This dissertation investigates how technology […]
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, […]
Modern high-performance GPU kernels increasingly rely on subgroup-level execution, including subgroup-level communication, subgroup operations, and matrix operations. These features are essential for workloads such as matrix multiplication and FlashAttention, but their language-level guarantees remain difficult to reason about. Existing programming models often leave unclear which threads participate in subgroup operations, when subgroup threads are required […]
Modern software increasingly relies on distributed systems to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable services. Choreographic programming brings a global perspective to distributed system development: programmers write a single program that describes the behavior of a whole system, and a compiler projects that global description into local programs run by each node. By making distributed control […]
Edge computing and distributed AI systems increasingly operate under heterogeneous resources, dynamic workloads, and frequent failures, requiring both adaptivity and fault tolerance for efficient execution. In heterogeneous edge clusters, nodes differ significantly in CPU throughput, memory capacity, and network bandwidth, while modern distributed GPU clusters supporting agentic LLM inference must recover large amounts of runtime […]
AI-assisted clinical decisions in medicine, and particularly in dermatology, demand fine-grained understanding across diverse skin tones, body sites, and disease types, yet expert-annotated datasets are scarce, demographically imbalanced, and almost devoid of rare presentations. This dissertation develops four deep learning systems for this low-label, low-coverage regime. We introduce HealNet, which learns wound healing stages from […]