• 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • Tang, M. (STAT) – Bayesian Modeling and Scalable Inference for Count Time Series in Infectious Disease Surveillance

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

    Real-time monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks calls for statistical models that recover interpretable quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number from noisy count data, track posterior uncertainty, and run on time scales compatible with daily updates. Existing methods address these aims through separate model classes. Discretized Hawkes processes, Poisson autoregressions, and distributed lag models each […]

  • Carrión, H. (CSE) – Deep Learning Algorithms for Medical Image Representation Learning and Understanding

    Virtual Event

    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 […]

  • Wang, Z. (CSE) – From Static Alignment to Adaptive Safety: Toward Reliable and Capable AI Systems

    Virtual Event

    Modern AI systems are rapidly moving beyond static text generation toward capable models and agents that reason, use tools, store memories, and update persistent state, yet safety methods still often assume a fixed model whose behavior can be controlled by output-level refusal. This leaves critical gaps in understanding why aligned models fail under adversarial pressure, […]