Keisha Ernst from the Catalyst Bio-Amendments and Compost Academy In Person Location: ISB 221 Zoom Link In this talk, Keisha will explore how biologically focused compost production differs from conventional composting systems designed primarily for waste diversion. She will discuss how microbial communities influence soil structure, nutrient cycling, plant resilience, and water dynamics—and how managing […]
Christopher Lang from the UCSC Environmental Studies Department In Person Location: ISB 221 Zoom Link Lang explores the politics of disposability in New Orleans, Louisiana, revealing how pollution intersects with Black community health, waste workers’ lives and livelihoods, and the city’s overall resilience in the face of increasing flood risk. Using a combination of methods […]
Presenter: Dr. Xun Tang, Stanford University Description: This talk covers an efficient numerical approach for compressing a high-dimensional discrete distribution function into a non-negative tensor train (NTT) format. The two settings we consider are variational inference and density estimation, whereby one has access to either the unnormalized analytic formula of the distribution or the samples […]
Presenter: Snigdha Panigrahi, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Michigan Description:Agglomerative hierarchical clustering is one of the most widely used approaches for exploring how observations in a dataset relate to each other. However, its greedy nature makes it highly sensitive to small perturbations in the data, often producing different clustering results and making it […]
Presenter Chenyu You, Stony Brook University Abstract In the rapidly growing area of machine learning, there is profound promise in crafting intelligent, data-driven methods for diverse real-world applications. Yet, in safety-critical domains like healthcare, some fundamental challenges remain: (1) The insufficiency of raw biomedical data emphasizes the need for data-efficient and robust learning approaches. (2) […]
Presenter: Dr. Newman, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University Description: Determining the factors that shape cell potency—the ability of a cell to differentiate into other cell types—is essential for understanding tissue biology in health and disease, including cancer. In previous work, we found that single-cell transcriptional diversity decreases across […]
Presenter: Richard “Ed” Green, Professor of Bimolecular Engineering @ UCSC Bio: Richard E. Green (Ed) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, USA in 1972. He graduated from the University of Georgia (B.Sc. Genetics) in 1997. Before graduate school, Ed was in Peace Corps (Barentu, Eritrea) and was a lab tech at Emory University. Ed studied with Steven […]
Presenter: Luat Vuong, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering, UC Riverside Description: Given the growing computational demands of machine learning, how can we scale approaches for sifting through large volumes of data—including patterned or delayed information embedded as “noise”? Many computer vision applications have a strict power budget and demand robust, rapid-response, and even real-time image […]
Presented by: Edward Wang Description: “What does it actually look like to invent something? In this talk, I trace the decade-long journey of turning a smartphone into a blood pressure monitor, from Seismo, which used smartphone accelerometers to measure pulse transit time, to BPClip, a dollar clip that brought calibration-free oscillometry to the fingertip, to VibroBP, which […]
Sanya Cowal from the UCSC Environmental Studies Department In Person Location: ISB 221 Zoom Link One of the most pressing global challenges considers how to combine sustainable agricultural land use with biodiversity conservation. Agricultural systems have been dramatically transformed and intensified, leading to the simplification of agricultural landscapes through increased agrochemical use, landscape homogeneity, decreased […]
Presenter: Riddhiman Bhattacharya, Postdoc, UCSC Description: We propose an active learning approach for dynamic fair resource allocation problems. In contrast to prior work that assumes full feedback from all agents on their allocations, we focus on scenarios where feedback is available only from a carefully select subset of agents at each epoch of the online […]
Presenter: Marcos Calegari Andrade, Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC Santa Cruz Description: In this talk, I will demonstrate how neural networks can represent the high-dimensional potential energy surfaces of many-body systems. By achieving the accuracy of first-principles quantum calculations at a fraction of the computational cost, these models enable atomistic simulations of condensed matter […]
Presenter: Philipp Haller, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Abstract: Distributed programming is notoriously difficult. Not only are distributed systems concurrent, they pose additional challenges including data consistency and fault tolerance. At the same time, the share of software systems that are necessarily distributed systems is growing rapidly. As a result, too many software developers are […]
Presenter: Katherine Bonini, Senior Genetic Counselor @ Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Description: It has long been argued that families are central to genomic medicine. Genomic risk, diagnosis, and management are rarely confined to a single individual, and separating patients’ interests from those of their relatives is often neither straightforward nor desirable. Despite this, […]
Presenter: Guan’ao Yan, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University Description: Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics technologies now let us map cellular diversity and tissue organization at high resolution, but the computational methods built to analyze these data are difficult to evaluate in a rigorous, reproducible way. Two key barriers are the lack of realistic synthetic data with […]
Presenter: Denis Titov, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley Description: Cells run thousands of chemical reactions simultaneously, and these reactions must be precisely controlled—like a thermostat that prevents overheating. When this control fails, diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and fatty liver disease result. One key control mechanism is allosteric regulation, where a small molecule binds […]
Presenter: Tanya Roosta, AMD Abstract: Autonomous research and web-navigation agents — OpenAI Deep Research, Gemini Deep Research Max, OpenAI Operator — are now shipping to millions of users. Yet independent evaluation finds leading agents reach less than 68% rubric compliance, and recent work shows that 14+ points of MMLU “performance” disappears once contamination is removed […]
Please register by Monday, May 4, 2026. If attending virtually, a Zoom link will be shared after you register. Join us for the International Research Opportunities Forum: focus on Latin America, a collaborative hybrid event hosted by the Division of Global Engagement and the Division of Graduate Studies. This forum is intended for faculty and […]
Presenter: Anil Damle, Associate Professor, Cornell University Description: The column subset selection problem is a classical topic in numerical linear algebra, with renewed interest driven by applications in computational quantum chemistry, integral equations, model reduction, and model compression in machine learning. This talk surveys recent advances that clarify how structural properties of a matrix influence […]
Presenter: Yu Zhang, Associate Professor, ECE Department of UC, Santa Cruz Description: Modern cyber-physical systems present statistical learning problems that deviate significantly from standard i.i.d. supervised settings. In particular, two challenges frequently arise: (i) learning under hard structural constraints, and (ii) learning under severe distributional imbalance and rare events. In this talk, I present two […]