Ph.D. Presentations

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  • Weatherwax, K. (CM) – LoFi to X and Y: Background Media Use as Colloquial Assistive Technology for Neurodivergent People

    Research in media psychology has often framed background media as a distraction that undermines performance. Such perspectives rely on narrow, output-oriented definitions of success and overlook the emotional, mental, social, and environmental needs that shape how people actually work. They also fail to account for neurodivergent experiences, ignoring the diverse ways people engage with media […]

  • Maya Scherr Willson headshot

    Penumbra de la memoria: Brown Bag with Maya Scherr-Willson

    Huerta Center Conference Room (Casa Latina) 641 Merrill Rd, Santa Cruz,, CA

    During this presentation, Maya Scherr-Willson (PhD Student in the Film and Media Department) will show material and reflect on insights from a research trip that laid the groundwork for Penumbra de la memoria, a feature documentary to be shot this summer. The project reunites eight women fifty years after they were held as political prisoners together […]

  • Alatawi, A. (ECE) – Learning-Based Channel Estimation for Next-Generation Wireless Communications

    Hybrid Event

    Accurate Channel State Information (CSI) is critical for coherent detection, equalization, and adaptive resource allocation in modern wireless systems. Traditional estimators rely on stationary statistical models, and many learning-based methods assume training and deployment conditions are matched. In practice, these assumptions break down under user mobility and environmental dynamics, leading to degraded performance. This proposal […]

  • Wang, S. (CSE) – Learned Hashing and Overlay Networks for AI-native Retrieval and Serving at Scale

    Hybrid Event

    Modern AI systems demand low-latency high-quality retrieval and serving over billion-scale keys and vectors. This proposal studies learned hashing and overlay networks to co-locate semantically related items and steer queries with minimal coordination. We first present LEAD, to our knowledge the first use of order-preserving learned hash functions in distributed key-value overlays, enabling efficient range […]

  • Nguyen, R. (BMEB) – Development of Computational Methods for Reliable Genetic Identification of Forensic Samples

    Hybrid Event

    Advances in sequencing technologies have enabled the recovery of genetic data from minimal, contaminated, and highly degraded samples, overcoming long-standing barriers in forensic analysis. Nevertheless, many evidentiary samples still yield poor-quality DNA that is unconducive to PCR amplification of short tandem repeats (STRs), microarray genotyping, or deep sequencing necessary for accurate, complete genotype calls. This […]

  • Petety, A. (CSE) – New Algorithmic Methods for Uncertain Inputs

    This dissertation focuses on designing and proving performance guarantees on algorithms when there is uncertainty in the input. The uncertainty could be from the user being unsure or future inputs that have not arrived yet. We look at different methods in which algorithms can be designed to be competitive against the optimal. One of the […]

  • Jorquera, Z. (CSE) – Quantum Entanglement Bounds and the Approximation Algorithms That Use Them

    Hybrid Event

    One of the central challenges in quantum computing is finding or approximating the ground-state energy of a local Hamiltonian, a quantum analogue of classical constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Among these, the Quantum Max-Cut problem serves as a canonical example, paralleling the classical Max-Cut problem. Despite its foundational importance in both theoretical computer science and condensed […]