•  Waste and Cataclysm, Waste as Catalyst: The Politics of Disposability in New Orleans

    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 […]

  • AM Seminar: Variational Inference and Density Estimation with Non-Negative Tensor Train

    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 […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Hierarchical Clustering with Confidence

    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 […]

  • CSE Colloquium – Robust Machine Learning for Biomedical Data: Efficiency, Reliability, and Generalizability

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

    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) […]

    Free
  • BME 280B Seminar: Speaker Dr. Aaron Newman – Molecular and spatial determinants of single-cell developmental states in cancer

    Biomedical Sciences Building 575 McLaughlin Drive

    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 […]

  • BME80G Seminar: Ed Green, “DNA Forensics in The Genomics Age”

    Jack Baskin Auditorium 191 Baskin Cir, Santa Cruz, CA

    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 […]

  • ECE 290 Seminar: Speaker Luat T. Vuong – Biospeculative approaches to the “needle in a haystack”: vortex encoders and hybrid optical neural-networks

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

    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 […]

  • CM Seminar: Edward Wang, “Inventing a New Blood Pressure Monitor”

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

    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 […]

  • Socio-Ecological Complexity in Coffee Agroecosystems

    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 […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Active Learning for Fair and Stable Allocations

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

    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 […]

  • AM Seminar: Machine Learning in Molecular Simulations: From Free Energy to Vibrational Spectroscopy

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

    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 […]

  • CSE Colloquium – Towards Safe and Resilient Large-scale Distributed Programming

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

    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 […]

    Free
  • AM Seminar: Using Math and Experiments to Study the Control of Cell Metabolism

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

    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 […]

  • International Research Opportunities Forum: focus on Latin America

    Engineering Building 2, E2-180

    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 […]

  • AM Seminar: Column Subset Selection: Theory, Structure, and Algorithms

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

    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 […]

  • FINS: Fisheries Insights Narratives and Stories seminar series featuring Melissa Mahoney

    Ocean Health Building McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA

    Please join us for the fourth talk in the FINS: Fisheries Insights Narratives and Stories seminar series featuring Melissa Mahoney giving her talk, “The Future of Blue: Co-Creating a Thriving Seafood Economy in Monterey Bay”.

    Melissa Mahoney brings over two decades of experience at the intersection of sustainable seafood, fisheries policy, and marine innovation along the U.S. West Coast. Since August 2022, Melissa has served as Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, where she leads initiatives to stabilize local fishing operations, expand community seafood access, and revitalize Monterey Bay’s working waterfront.

    Preceding the talk please join us for a networking coffee hour (snacks provided) and a student-only lunch after the talk.

  • CSE Colloquium – The EU’s Cybersecurity Framework: what it is, what it means

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

    Presenter: Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, Lothar Determann, Pieter T.J. Wolters Abstract: The European Union has enacted a comprehensive cybersecurity framework (the “Framework”) that imposes far-reaching obligations on developers […]

    Free