• Zheng, Y. (CSE) – Extending eBPF Beyond Kernel Extensions: Verified Interfaces for Runtime System Extensibility

    Virtual Event

    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 […]

  • Oh, S. (CSE) – Efficient Instruction Supply for Datacenter Processors

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

    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 […]

  • Ortiz Barbosa, D. (CSE) – HARDENING AUTONOMOUS CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS AGAINST ADVERSARIAL CONDITIONS

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

    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 […]

  • Yang, D. (CSE) – Inner Monologue: a Pathway to Human-Like Reasoning for Complex Tasks

    Silicon Valley Campus 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, United States
    Hybrid Event

    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), […]

  • Zhou, K. (CSE) – Toward Safer Frontier AI: From Evaluation and Red-Teaming to Alignment and Oversight

    Virtual Event

    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 […]

  • Qureshi, A. (ECE) – ISoC: A Universal Impedance Spectroscopy Instrument-on-Chip in SKY130 130 nm CMOS

    Virtual Event

    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 […]

  • Zhu, R. (ECE) – From Neuromorphic Principles to Efficient Neural Language Architectures

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

    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 […]

  • Figuerres, S. (ECE) – Ion Transport Mechanisms for Bioelectronics

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

    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 […]

  • Bose, S. (ECE) – Learning-Augmented Optimization, Control, and Inference in Modern Power Systems

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

    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, […]

  • Kordonowy, S. (CS) – The Role of Circuits in Near-Term Quantum Computation

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

    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 […]

  • Imlau Dagostini, J. (CSE) – Intent-Driven Orchestration for Scientific Computing

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

    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. […]

  • Chen, Z. (CSE) – GPU Subgroup Semantics for Portable High-Performance Kernels

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

    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 […]

  • Shen, G. (CSE) – Library-Level Choreographic Programming

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

    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 […]