• CSE Colloquium – Constraining Chaos: Toward Faithful and Semantic Decoding in Language Models

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

    Presenter: Loris D’Antoni, UC San Diego Abstract: Language models excel at producing fluent text, but in domains like code and math, fluency isn’t enough — outputs must obey strict syntactic and semantic rules. A new wave of research is rethinking decoding itself: not as a process of sampling words, but as a negotiation between probability, structure, and […]

    Free
  • BME Seminar: Rotation Talks

    Physical Sciences Building Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Grad Students Description: Rotation Talks Bio: N/A Hosted by: Professor Rebecca DuBois, BME Department

  • ECE Seminar: Tactile sensing: At the boundary between mechanical and computational intelligence in robotic grippers

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

    Presenter: Dr. Hannah Stuart, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley Description: Robot grippers typically include mechanical intelligence (e.g., underactuation, compliance) or computational intelligence (e.g., fully actuated with a wide array of sensors). Next generation grippers and hands will require both intelligences to work in concert across applications with […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Boosting Biomedical Imaging Analysis via Distributed Functional Regression and Synthetic Surrogates

    Virtual Event

    Presenter: Guannan Wang, Associate Professor, The College of William & Mary Description: Generative AI has emerged as a powerful tool for synthesizing biomedical images, offering new solutions to challenges such as data scarcity, privacy constraints, and modality imbalance. However, the reliable use of synthetic images in scientific analysis requires principled statistical frameworks that can assess […]

  • CM Seminar – “Revealing Hidden Stories: Co-Designing the Thámien Ohlone Augmented Reality Tour”

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

    Presented by: Kai Lukoff Description: The Santa Clara University campus is adorned with symbols and monuments, including a Spanish Mission Church, that highlight its Catholic heritage. However, the presence and history of the Ohlone Native Americans, who have inhabited this land for thousands of years and continue to live in the region, receive little to […]

  • AM Seminar: Probing Forced Responses and Causality in Data-Driven Climate Emulators: Conceptual Limitations and the Role of Reduced-Order Models

    Virtual Event

    Presenter: Fabrizio Falasca, New York University Description: A central challenge in climate science and applied mathematics is developing data-driven models of multiscale systems that capture both stationary statistics and responses to external perturbations. Current neural climate emulators aim to resolve the atmosphere–ocean system in all its complexity but often struggle to reproduce forced responses, limiting […]

  • CSE Colloquium – Towards Relational Foundation Models: Zero-Shot Forecasting over Relational Databases

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

    Presenter: Charilaos I. Kanatsoulis, Stanford University Abstract: Foundation models have transformed unstructured domains such as language and vision, yet relational datasets, where most enterprise knowledge lives, still rely on brittle, task-specific ML pipelines. I will begin by introducing Relational Deep Learning (RDL), a general framework for learning directly from heterogeneous multi-table data, capturing structure across entities, attributes, […]

    Free
  • Statistics Seminar: Inferring Unobserved Trajectories from Multiple Temporal Snapshots

    Hybrid Event

    Presenter: Yunyi Shen, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Description: Practitioners often aim to infer an unobserved population trajectory using sample snapshots at multiple time points. E.g. given single-cell sequencing data, scientists would like to learn how gene expression changes over a cell’s life cycle. But sequencing any […]

  • BME 280B Seminar: Satellite repeats encode megabase-scale transcription factor hubs

    Physical Sciences Building Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Matt Franklin, Postdoctoral Researcher, Stanford University Description: Eukaryotic genomes contain large stretches of repetitive DNA called satellite DNA, often found near centromeres and ribosomal DNA regions. In humans, alpha satellite has well-established roles in centromere biology, however the functions of other human satellite DNAs remain largely unexplored. We recently identified the Hippo pathway effector […]

  • Allen van Gelder Memorial

    University Center University Center, Santa Cruz, CA

    You are cordially invited to an event celebrating the life and research legacy of Allen van Gelder, who passed away in April 2025 after 37 years of dedicated service to the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz. Thursday, January 29, 2025 Reception begins 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm Alumni Room, University Center, UC […]

  • ECE Seminar: Advanced Packaging as the Engine of the AI Systems Era

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

    Presenter: Tolga Acikalin, System and Package Architect, Lumilens Description: The rapid rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning—most notably recent breakthroughs in large language models—is reshaping the trajectory of the semiconductor industry and ushering in a new era of system innovation. As performance scaling at the device level slows, heterogeneous integration (HI) has emerged as […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Mathematical Foundations for Machine Learning from a Nonlinear Time Series Perspective

    Hybrid Event

    Presenter: Jiaqi Li, William H. Kruskal Instructor, University of Chicago Description:Modern machine learning (ML) algorithms achieve remarkable empirical success, yet providing rigorous statistical guarantees remains a major challenge, particularly in distributional theory and online inference methods. In this talk, we will introduce a novel framework to provide mathematical foundations for ML by bringing powerful tools […]

  • AM Seminar: Are Graph Learning Methods Actually Learning?

    Presenter: Seshadhri Comandur, Professor of Computer Science, UCSC Description: There has been a lot of literature on graph machine learning over the past few years, and a bewildering array of new methods. This talk is based on a series of results making a provocative argument. Maybe many graph machine learning methods are not really that […]

  • GDAC Portfolio Workshop

    Cultural Center – Merrill College 641 Merrill Rd, Santa Cruz, United States

    Part of the GDA Conference on campus – come and learn best practices for creating a portfolio to use in the gaming industry!

  • ECE Seminar: Integrated Micro- and Nanosystems for Biosensing, Neural Therapy, and Nanotoxicity

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

    Presenter: Dr. Ke Du, Associate Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Riverside Description: Miniaturized micro- and nanofluidic systems, integrated with biochemistry, microscopy, nanomaterials, and computer vision algorithms, provide powerful platforms for diverse biomedical applications, including molecular diagnostics, biophysics, and optogenetics. In this presentation, we introduce a pneumatically controlled nano-sieve device with nanolithography-defined […]

  • CM Seminar – “The ‘Social’ Side of Social Virtual Reality”

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

    Presented by: Bree McEwan Description: One of the potential use cases of virtual reality is to create spaces where humans can interact with each other or virtual agents across distances. However, despite many of the technological challenges of social VR being solved, social VR does not see poised for widespread adoption. Multi-user social VR needs to […]