This work addresses improvements in branch prediction mechanism to support high perfor- mance processors. The state of the art aims to balance the prediction latency and prediction accuracy using multi […]
Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) agents promise effective security automation with minimal human intervention, yet their deployment raises three interconnected challenges: agents must be realistic (reproducing diverse attacker sophistication), secure (preventing […]
Workplace concern reporting infrastructure, including human resources (HR) portals, grievance procedures, and whistleblower hotlines, is the formal channel through which employees in most organizations raise concerns about harassment, discrimination, and […]
Play is often seen as a form of entertainment, leisure, or childhood development. However, it also acts as a meaningful experience that shapes how people connect with others and interact […]
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are rapidly becoming general-purpose AI systems, yet their capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to evaluate, improve, and validate their reliability in realistic use. […]
Modern system software increasingly needs runtime extensibility: userspace applications need safe ways to expose domain-specific extension points, GPU resource management needs workload-specific memory and scheduling policies, and kernel eBPF JIT compilers need different runtime optimizations as workloads and hardware vary. However, built-in policies are safe but difficult to specialize across rapidly changing workloads and hardware […]
Modern datacenter CPUs lose 25–66% of execution cycles to instruction-delivery stalls. This bottleneck persists, despite the recent trend towards accelerators and GPUs, as there is continuing demand by applications that only execute on CPUs. Two workload classes dominate today’s datacenter execution cycles: hyperscale server software (databases, build systems, and content stores), whose large instruction footprints […]
Autonomous systems, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and drones, are increasingly deployed across a wider array of contexts for both civilian and military use. As these systems become more common, they may be targeted by malicious actors seeking to exploit and abuse them, compromising safety-critical operations. Among the ways to protect these systems simulation based […]
A central goal on the path toward general AI is to build systems capable of deliberative reasoning before action. Such systems should inspect what they know, identify what they need, seek or construct useful information, and revise their reasoning through intermediate cognitive states. This dissertation studies this goal through the lens of Inner Monologue (IM), […]
This dissertation investigates how to make modern AI systems safer as they grow more capable. It addresses two central sources of risk: malicious misuse, in which adversarial users coerce models into harmful behavior, and internal misalignment, in which models themselves pursue goals that diverge from human intent through deception, sandbagging, or other covert behaviors. The […]
Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is the workhorse measurement behind lithium-ion battery diagnostics, biosensing, and corrosion science — yet no integrated circuit has ever delivered the complete capability of a benchtop analyzer on a single die. This dissertation presents ISoC, the first universal Impedance Spectroscopy instrument-on-chip. Designed in SkyWater 130 nm CMOS process, ISoC supports all […]
This dissertation investigates how neuromorphic and brain-inspired principles can guide the design of efficient neural language architectures. It addresses two central limitations of modern Transformer-based language models: memory growth with context length and high computational cost from dense matrix multiplication. Through studies of spiking neural networks, linear-recurrent language models, hybrid attention architectures, MatMul-free models, and […]
Recently, a class of non-invasive hardware side-channel attacks has been discovered in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These attacks extract remnants of prior users’ activity that persist as transistor defect states within reconfigurable routing resources. These remnants are known as FPGA Pentimenti. Resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) is a compelling candidate for pentimenti-like attacks beyond FPGAs. However, […]
Ion transfer as the movement of charged species across spaces and interfaces is the basis of signaling in nearly all biological systems. My research is grounded in the idea that […]
The electric grid is essential to modern society, and recent developments such as renewable energy sources (RESs), battery energy storage systems (ESSs), and microgrids (MGs) have necessitated novel computational methods for planning and operations. Machine learning offers a promising lever here, both as an accelerator for and proxy to traditional optimization-based problems. In this thesis, […]
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, immune-response, or other functions that the host is dependent on for survival or reproduction. Intracellular symbioses allow both the host and the symbiont to occupy […]
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 genome benchmark (T2T-HG002) to provide a detailed study of centromeric sequence and chromatin architecture on individual haplotypes. Using adaptive-sampling-enriched, ultra-long-read DiMeLo-seq, we achieve single-molecule chromatin […]
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 […]
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 […]