Events

Chou, Y. (CM) - Exploring Future AI-Mediated Health Creator–Audience Interactions on Social Media: Transparency, Care, and Accountability
2026-05-26 07:00 - 09:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Health and wellness content creators play an important role in shaping how people receive and engage with health information on social media. Beyond delivering information, they also convey care, build trust, and sustain relationships with audiences. As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly integrated into creator work, existing research has examined AI disclosure, AI-mediated communication, and health communication more broadly, but less is known about how AI should be integrated into health creator–audience interactions, where informational support, emotional care, accountability, and relational meaning are often intertwined. My dissertation examines AI-mediated health creator–audience interaction through four connected studies. Study 1 used mock-up interfaces and semi-structured interviews with 16 Instagram users who interact with health and wellness creators to examine audience perceptions of GenAI use disclosure. Study 2 conducts co-design sessions with social media health creators to explore how creators might communicate human labor and personal contribution in a future social media environment where AI-generated content is widespread. Study 3 extends the focus to audience-invoked AI in public comment sections by scraping and analyzing comment data from platfrom X, examining how audiences invoke AI agents through @-mentions in response to health creator posts, and how these public AI invocations may shape information credibility, accountability, community discussion, and social dynamics. Finally, Study 4 will synthesize insights from the first three studies and translate them into interactive prototypes. By examining how audiences and health creators interact with these prototypes, this study will explore future forms of AI-mediated health creator–audience interaction and broader community engagement on social media.

Event Host: Yuling Ruby Chou, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media
Advisor: Christina Chung
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94127645445?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Weber, Z. (ECE) - Sustainable Bioinspired Polymer–Mineral Composites for Adaptable Repair in Conservation Applications
2026-05-26 09:30 - 11:30 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Every year, tens of thousands of tons of plaster-based materials are used in restoration and conservation applications, many of which are derived from non-renewable sources and discarded at the end of their service life. Here, we introduce a biodegradable, bio-derived composite based on chitosan and calcium carbonate that is composed of simple, widely available constituents and designed for adaptable repair applications. By varying polymer molecular weight, concentration, and mineral content, the composite can be formulated to span injectable, paste-like, and putty-like behaviors, enabling accommodation of diverse structural filling and stabilization needs. We examine relationships between composition, flow behavior, and mechanical performance through rheological characterization of the wet composite and measurements of bulk density, porosity, and compressive strength in the hardened state. Rather than targeting a single optimized formulation, this work demonstrates a tunable material platform in which relationships between composition, flow behavior and mechanical performance guide selection of material behavior based on application requirements. Future applications of this approach include sustainable repair and conservation materials for exhibits, architectural restoration, and other contexts where adaptable handling, mechanical integrity, and biodegradability are desired.
Event Host: Zoë Weber, Ph.D. Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: Marco Rolandi
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96509847894?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

ECE Seminar: Advanced Sensing and AI Technologies for Food Safety and Precision Agriculture
2026-05-26 10:00 - 11:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Hamid Jafarbiglu, Agricultural Technology Evaluator, Big Idea Ventures
Description: California agriculture is increasingly adopting organic and regenerative production systems, creating a growing need for technologies capable of monitoring complex agricultural environments, assessing food safety risks, and supporting data-driven management decisions. Emerging tools such as drones, hyperspectral scanning, environmental sensors, and artificial intelligence provide new opportunities for continues field-scale monitoring, risk detection, and precision management while supporting sustainable agricultural practices. This talk highlights several applied research projects focused on the use of drone-based sensing, spatio-spectral responses, soil and environmental sensors, and machine learning approaches to address real- world challenges in specialty crop production. These projects demonstrate how sensing technologies and advanced analytics can improve field-scale monitoring, continuous risk assessment, early detection, and suitability in food production. Building on these experiences, future research directions will focus on the intersection of food safety, organic and regenerative agriculture, and precision agricultural technologies.
Bio: Hamid Jafarbiglu is a researcher specializing in remote sensing, spectral analysis, and machine learning for agricultural systems. His work focuses on enhancing food safety, crop monitoring, and precision decision-making in high-value specialty crops.

Dr. Jafarbiglu earned his Ph.D. in Biological Systems Engineering from the University of California, Davis, following six years of intensive field research. His expertise integrates drone-based remote sensing, hyperspectral imaging, and AI to identify crop stress, pest/disease outbreaks, and nutrient deficiencies at their earliest stages.

During his tenure at the UC Davis Digital Agriculture Lab, Dr. Jafarbiglu’s doctoral and postdoctoral research resolved critical limitations in aerial spectral measurements. This work led to superior accuracy in drone-based sensing under variable field conditions and the development of scalable image-processing pipelines and digital orchard models for deep learning applications.
Beyond research, Dr. Jafarbiglu is an experienced extension professional. He has delivered hands-on training in drone operations and geospatial analysis to growers, researchers, and industry stakeholders, bridging the gap between data-driven innovation and real-world adoption.

His background also extends to the commercial sector; as an Agricultural Technology Evaluator with Big Idea Ventures, he conducted technical and market assessments for agri-food innovations, including early-stage bio-based products. Today, Dr. Jafarbiglu’s work continues to advance the integration of AI and remote sensing to foster sustainable, regenerative farming and robust food systems across California and beyond.
Hosted by: Professor Marco Rolandi, ECE Department
Zoom Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96727838511?pwd=[REDACTED]

Harsh, B. (CSE) - SUPERSCALAR, MULTIPLE TAKEN BRANCH PREDICTOR
2026-05-26 10:00 - 11:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
This work addresses improvements in branch prediction mechanism to support high perfor-
mance processors. The state of the art aims to balance the prediction latency and prediction
accuracy using multi level correcting predictors [27]. Prior published work focusses on scalar
designs and prediction accuracy improvement for hard to predict branches employing tailor
made, non generic and non transferrable solutions [8]. Recent work also proposes ahead pre-
diction [42–44] to solve the problem of low accuracy of L0 predictor.
This work proposes efﬁcent, generic and transferrable solutions to reduce mispredic-
tions and to use the fetch bandwidth more efﬁciently. This includes a biased overriding multi-
level hierarchy with three predictor levels (L0, L1, L2). L0 uses a High-Conﬁdence-Only Taken
(HOTP) predictor that only predicts high-conﬁdence taken control-ﬂow instructions. This work
further uses L1-L2 biased training to decrease mispredictions by L2 while it trains on branches
on which L1 has reached high conﬁdence. This work proposes a superscalar predictor built
using the state of the art scalar predictor. Superscalar predictor is implemented by sizing a su-
perscalar TAGE variant (BATAGE) using Optuna-based search. with varying table sizes and
aspect ratios. The work further proposes a branch predictor frontend design (nTakenBP) to de-
liver multiple taken branch predictions per cycle. Unlike prior work, nTakenBP achieves this by
extending the existing BTB and TAGE tag-comparison logic rather than deepening lookahead.

Event Host: Bhawandeep Singh Harsh, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Jose Renau
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/4166778865?pwd=[REDACTED]

Castro, S. (CSE) - Agentic AI for Security: Adversarial Foundations for Autonomous Cyber Operations
2026-05-26 10:30 - 12:30 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) agents promise effective security automation with minimal human intervention, yet their deployment raises three interconnected challenges: agents must be realistic (reproducing diverse attacker sophistication), secure (preventing autonomy from becoming an attack surface), and feasible (safely replicating human behavior at full autonomy).
We argue that these three properties are requirements for ACO agents. Existing approaches do not address them together and lack diverse adversarial coverage, formal threat models for attacks against the agents themselves, and systematic evaluation of multi-agent topologies.
We advance all three ACO properties: (1) For realism, we establish adversarial foundations by discovering Windows OS vulnerabilities and releasing two exploits reliable across XP through 11. (2) For security, we formalize ACO meta-attacks and meta-defenses, propose the first invariant-based Meta-IDS detecting both sensor and actuator meta-attacks, and introduce the first hybrid LLM–RL ACO integration for defense with a novel inter-agent communication protocol. (3) For feasibility, we present MaLO, the first dynamic-topology multi-agent ACO system, achieving a 78.6% success rate across a new 42-task security benchmark and solving operations up to 40× faster than human experts. We further propose the Security Operation Complexity Index (SOCX) classification and the T×V×O taxonomy as the first objective-driven evaluation methodology for coding-agent attacks.
Together, these contributions demonstrate that ACO agents can match real-world adversarial sophistication, resist meta-attacks, and outperform human operators on complex security tasks. Open challenges remain in adaptive adversaries, LLM–RL co-training, dynamic topology selection, and deployment beyond simulated environments.

Event Host: Sebastián R. Castro, PhD Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Alvaro A. Cárdenas
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/2267557290?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Liu, P. (CM) - Reimagining Workplace Concern Reporting: From Emotional Harm to Co-Designed Futures
2026-05-26 11:00 - 13:00
Workplace concern reporting infrastructure, including human resources (HR) portals, grievance procedures, and whistleblower hotlines, is the formal channel through which employees in most organizations raise concerns about harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Yet existing research consistently finds that these systems fail the employees they are meant to protect: reports stall, concerns get filtered, retaliation occurs, and marginalized employees face disproportionate risk. This dissertation examines workplace concern reporting as relational, emotional, and processual rather than procedural and discrete, and pursues this account through three studies. Study 1, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 12 HR professionals and 10 employees in California, develops the concept of emotional re-victimization to describe how reporting infrastructure produces additional harm at multiple stages of the reporting process. Study 2 returns to the same corpus with a different theoretical lens to develop the concept of buffer spaces: intermediary practices through which employees navigate the gap between informal sense-making and formal escalation. Study 3 will move the dissertation from diagnostic to practical work in two phases. Phase 1 uses speculative co-design with employees and HR professionals to surface what each group would build if they could redesign concern reporting infrastructure together. Phase 2 translates design directions from Phase 1 into prototypes, iterated with participants across both groups to develop design artifacts that have been shaped by the people who would use them. The dissertation as a whole moves from documenting harm, through identifying workarounds, to imagining redesign, contributing to HCI/CSCW scholarship on workplace technology, labor studies on employee voice and accountability, and methodological work on cross-stakeholder speculative design.
Event Host: Peiyao Liu, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media
Advisor: Norman Makoto Su
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99335305923?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Baskaran, D. (CM) - More than Just Fun: Exploring Meaningful Play, Communities of Play, and Relatedness of Play
2026-05-27 09:00 - 11:00
Play is often seen as a form of entertainment, leisure, or childhood development. However, it also acts as a meaningful experience that shapes how people connect with others and interact with the world around them throughout their lives. Prior work on meaningful play and communities of play has mainly focused on individual experiences and participation, giving less attention to how meaning is socially co-constructed through playful interactions and to how these experiences contribute to relatedness, or the human need to feel connected to and belong with others, across physical, digital, and hybrid environments.
Using qualitative methods, this dissertation proposal explores how meaningful play is collectively constructed within communities of play and how it shapes relatedness among members. This work positions meaningful play as a socially and technologically embedded relational phenomenon rather than solely an individual experience. Across case studies of PlayStation trophy hunting, Pokémon Nuzlocke, LEGO, and theme park communities of play, this research explores how meaningful play within these communities contributes to relatedness among members. Ultimately, this dissertation proposal aims to advance a more holistic understanding of play as a process through which people build shared meaning, connection, and belonging in increasingly digital and hybrid social spaces.

Event Host: Derusha Baskaran, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media
Advisor: Kathryn Ringland

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96290198842?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Tu, H. (CSE) - From Evaluation to Adaptation: Building Reliable Multimodal Intelligence
2026-05-27 09:00 - 11:00
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are rapidly becoming general-purpose AI systems, yet their capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to evaluate, improve, and validate their reliability in realistic use. Standard benchmarks mainly measure in-distribution final-answer accuracy, leaving critical gaps in safety, robustness, fine-grained reasoning evaluation, and reliability in real-world agentic settings. My research proposes an evaluation-to-adaptation framework for building reliable multimodal intelligence: developing rigorous evaluations that expose failures beyond conventional benchmarks, learning feedback models that guide inference-time reasoning, and studying how multimodal systems can adapt through experience. We instantiate this agenda through two completed works and two proposed directions. Unicorn evaluates safety and robustness under out-of-distribution and adversarial conditions, revealing substantial vulnerabilities across 22 vision-language models. ViLBench studies vision-language process reward modeling as both an evaluation challenge and a mechanism for inference-time improvement, showing that process-guided reasoning selection can improve reliability. Building on these foundations, we further study test-time experience accumulation and explore reliable multimodal agents for GUI and computer-use tasks. Together, my research aims to move beyond capability-driven progress alone, toward multimodal AI systems whose reliability can be evaluated, improved, and tested in realistic deployment settings.
Event Host: Haoqin Tu, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Cihang Xie
Zoom: 964 1355 0550
Passcode: [REDACTED]

FINS: Fisheries Insights Narratives and Stories seminar series featuring Lisa Uttal
2026-05-27 10:30 - 12:00 | Ocean Health Building, McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Please join us for the final talk in the FINS: Fisheries Insights Narratives and Stories seminar series featuring Lisa Uttal.
FINS: Fisheries Insights Narratives and Stories Seminar Series
Lisa Uttal, Marine Biologist for Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary
Title: Science Unlocked: Translating Research into Public Stewardship
When: Wednesday, May 27th from 11am-12pm
Where: Ocean Health Building Rm 118, 115 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA 95060 and on Zoom
Agenda:

10:30 am – 11:00 am – Professional Networking Session (in person only – light snacks and refreshments provided)
11 am to 12 pm – presentation followed by Q & A
12 pm – 1pm – student lunch with the speaker in OHB courtyard → sign up here

Zoom Meeting Registration: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/NwH0_qUbSeuIm3A76DY-Dg

CSE Colloquium - Learning to Image: Computational Microscopy for Dynamic Systems
2026-05-27 11:00 - 12:30 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Laura Waller, UC Berkeley
Abstract:
Computational imaging jointly designs hardware and algorithms to push beyond the classical limits of imaging, enabling measurement of new quantities (e.g. 3D, phase, and super-resolution) with simple, inexpensive hardware. These approaches have already transformed consumer photography; our goal is to achieve a similar transformation in scientific microscopy.
In this talk, I will show how end-to-end learning is reshaping the design of imaging systems, from programmable illumination with LED arrays to compact, lensless cameras built from Scotch tape. By combining physical models with neural networks, we can jointly learn how to capture data, reconstruct images, and self-calibrate systems that would otherwise be too complex to model. However, many computational methods rely on multiple measurements, limiting their use for live, dynamic samples. I will introduce new space-time algorithms based on implicit neural representations (INRs) that jointly recover structure and motion, correct artifacts, and enable high-resolution imaging in regimes where traditional approaches fail.
Bio:
Laura Waller is the Charles A. Desoer Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She received B.S., M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004, 2005 and 2010. After that, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer of Physics at Princeton University from 2010-2012. She is a Packard Fellow for Science & Engineering, Moore Foundation Data-driven Investigator, OSA Fellow, and Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She has received the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award, OSA Adolph Lomb Medal, the SPIE Early Career Award and the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal.
Hosted by: Professor Alvaro Cardenas
Location: Engineering 2, Room E2-180 (Refreshments such as fruit, pastries, coffee, and tea will be provided.)
Zoom Option: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

Film Screening—Let the City Speak: The Sonic Journey of Quetzal—Arts Dean's Speaker Series
2026-05-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Digital Arts Research Center, 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Audiences are invited to Let the City Speak: The Sonic Journey of Quetzal—a conversation and panel discussion with filmmaker Akira Boch and Quetzal members Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores. Introduced by Interim Dean and Professor of Film and Digital Media Lawrence Andrews. Conversation and panel discussion with UCSC Professors Russell Rodriguez and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (4:00–6:00 p.m.) with reception (6:00–6:30 p.m.) immediately following the panel.
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ABOUT THE SERIES
This event is presented as part of the “Arts Dean’s Speaker Series,” an annual event focused on bringing together scholarship and practice related to critical issues of our time in the Arts, in order to expand our students’ imaginations on what is possible, the importance of ambition and aspiration and tackling real structural problems and exclusions in our society and in the arts.
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public.
– REGISTER ON EVENTBRITE here for the 4:00 p.m. panel event due to limited venue capacity.
– Attend in person in the Dark Lab (DARC 108) at the Digital Arts Research Center at UC Santa Cruz.
– Doors open 30 minutes prior to the scheduled event start time.
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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
noon–1:30 p.m.: Film screening of Let the City Speak: The Sonic Journey of Quetzal (no registration needed for the screening)
4:00–6:30 p.m.: Conversation and panel discussion with UCSC Professors Russell Rodriguez and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (4:00–6:00 p.m.) with reception (6:00–6:30 p.m.) immediately following the panel.

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PARKING
– Parking by UCSC permit or ParkMobile.
– Arts Lot #126 is the closest parking lot to the event.
– Visitors with DMV placards or plates may park for free in DMV spaces, Medical spaces, or ParkMobile spaces without additional payment, or in timed zones for longer than the posted time.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS).
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Zheng, Y. (CSE) - Extending eBPF Beyond Kernel Extensions: Verified Interfaces for Runtime System Extensibility
2026-05-27 12:00 - 14:00
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 environments, limiting efficiency, while code modifications are flexible but difficult to deploy safely. This dissertation argues that verified eBPF interfaces can turn eBPF from a kernel-extension mechanism into a general substrate for safe runtime extensibility. In this model, trusted mechanisms expose narrow, constrained programmable hooks; extensions declare their requirements; verifier-enforced checks preserve safety; and execution remains low-overhead.
I develop this thesis through three systems spanning userspace applications, heterogeneous GPU subsystems, and the kernel eBPF compiler itself. EIM, implemented in bpftime, applies verified eBPF interfaces to userspace applications, allowing application behavior to be extended through explicit constraints and efficient userspace eBPF execution. gpu_ext extends the same idea to heterogeneous systems by exposing programmable resource management hooks for GPU memory and scheduling policy across driver and device. BpfReJIT with kinsn makes the eBPF JIT compiler itself extensible: it enables runtime-guided optimization through dynamic recompilation and extends eBPF bytecode to express diverse hardware capabilities. Together, these systems show how verified eBPF interfaces can support safe programmability, separation of policy and mechanisms, and runtime specialization across applications, GPU subsystems, and the kernel JIT infrastructure.
Event Host: Yusheng Zheng, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Andi Quinn
Zoom: 504 350 0245
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Panel Discussion—Let the City Speak: The Sonic Journey of Quetzal—Arts Dean's Speaker Series
2026-05-27 16:00 - 18:30 | Digital Arts Research Center, 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064

Your Next Degree: Graduate School
2026-05-27 17:00 - 18:30
Careers and academic interests often evolve over time, and many people choose to pursue graduate education after gaining experience in the workforce or further exploring their fields. Whether you are considering a master’s or PhD, in an academic or professional program, graduate school can be a powerful step toward advancing your goals, shifting career paths, or deepening your expertise.
This UCLA Alumni webinar will explore what it takes to apply to graduate school across a range of disciplines. The application process can differ significantly from other advanced degrees and depends on your individual goals and motivations. You will gain an overview of the process and timeline, hear from a representative from the UCLA Division of Graduate Education, and learn how to evaluate programs such as those offered through the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. A UCLA Career Center representative will also share insights on how graduate education can help unlock future career opportunities.
Whether you are actively preparing an application or just beginning to consider graduate school, this session will help clarify the process and available pathways.
This program, hosted by UCLA, is open to UC alumni from all 10 campuses.
Website for additional information
Registration link

“So, There We Were...” – Celebrating the Untold Stories Behind the Discoveries
2026-05-27 17:00 - 19:30 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
To celebrate another year of profound discoveries, uplifting unheard voices, and opening up the world for the next generation of students, the Academic Senate is planning a year-end celebratory event on Wednesday, May 27, 5-7:30 pm (week 9), at the Haybarn. But lest you think this is yet one more end-of-year academic event with mind-numbing presentations and hard-to-read powerpoint slides, think again. This Scholarly Event is an excuse for us to do what we never get to do: come together to share the real stories behind our work and, most of all, HAVE FUN! In this spirit we are launching a celebratory event to feature the true but unknown, the odd, the awkward, and just plain unbelievable stories behind our research:
“So, There We Were…”
Celebrating the Untold Stories Behind the Discoveries

These might be the adventures, misadventures, revelations, miscues, or simply the “you would never believe it all worked out” moments that we have all experienced but rarely talk about (at least not in public). These are the stories that our friends, neighbors, and students want to hear, but never would make it into scholarly publications or presentations. These are the stories we swap with our colleagues over drinks. While this event is intended primarily for faculty, the campus community and community members will be welcome to attend (in other words, feel free to bring your kids, your partner, your neighbors).

We are therefore soliciting applications (or nominations if you know someone—including yourself—who really needs to share that story) to regale your colleagues with details about “that time that…(fill in the blank),” while showing how those hidden moments shaped what finally came out of that research. This is meant to be a lighthearted and fun event, so while having the audience learn something about what you do and why it is SO COOL is very good, our focus will remain on humor, fun, and engaging tales. As the Ig Nobel Awards put it: “First make them laugh…then make them think!”

Presenters will give a ~10 min TED style talk. Talks must begin with the phrase “So, there we were” (or “So, there I was” ) and they should feature the adventurous, the bizarre, and ideally the humorous in your research. Absolutely no tedious PowerPoints, jargon, or literature background review will be allowed.

A reception will follow. Or it may precede, or even take place during, the event. But rest assured, we will be celebrating in style.

NB: There may well be prizes. But we have not gotten quite that far yet.

Build better chips
2026-05-27 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Verify faster. Build better chips.
Semiconductor Design Info Session
Explore the fast-paced world of semiconductor design and verification, and how advanced tools—including AI—are transforming the industry.
At this info session, instructor Mandar Munishwar, a formal verification architect at the Intel Data Center and AI Division, will discuss his SystemVerilog Assertions and Formal Verification course which prepares you to write assertions, create verification test plans, and use simulation and formal tools to catch design issues early and improve first-pass silicon success.
Discover how this hands-on, lab-based course builds practical skills in SystemVerilog, assertion-based verification, and formal verification using industry-standard tools like VCS and VC Formal. You’ll better understand emerging trends such as AI-assisted assertion generation and debugging.
See how this course in the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Semiconductor Design program can help advance your career in chip design and verification engineering.
Claim your seat!
You might also be interested in:

Physical Design Flow From Netlist to GDSII | June 5
Practical Design with Xilinx FPGAs | June 15
System and Functional Verification Using UVM | June 18
SystemVerilog Assertions and Formal Verification | June 22
Advanced Verification with SystemVerilog OOP Testbench | June 25
Comprehensive Signal and Power Integrity for High-Speed Digital Systems | June 25

Oh, S. (CSE) - Efficient Instruction Supply for Datacenter Processors
2026-05-28 11:00 - 12:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 create severe frontend pathologies; and agentic AI systems, in which large-language-model agents plan, dispatch tools, and maintain growing conversational contexts, causing CPUs to account for up to 88% of end-to-end agent latency. Reflecting this shift, major CPU vendors have publicly repositioned the CPU as the orchestration layer of the AI stack and have begun shipping processors optimized for agent-centric workloads.
This dissertation argues that instruction delivery is the dominant CPU bottleneck across both workload classes and that the recent trend towards agentic AI further exacerbates this challenge. In hyperscale server binaries, the primary pathologies are wrong-path prefetch pollution and post-recovery instruction-delivery gaps across large, irregular call graphs. In agentic AI systems, the bottleneck shifts to an orchestration substrate composed of protocol stacks, dynamic-runtime dispatch, and agent-specific extensions that is even more frontend-bound than traditional warehouse-scale workloads.
To address these bottlenecks, this dissertation presents three technical contributions, together with a companion infrastructure contribution. First, Utility-Driven Prefetching (UDP) extends fetch-directed instruction prefetching (FDIP) with a learned per-prefetch utility model that admits candidates based on their historical contribution to demand-fetch hits, including those reached along wrong-path execution. Second, Junction-based Unified Miss-point Prefetching (JUMP) addresses the post-recovery instruction-delivery gap that UDP and prior FDIP optimizations cannot reach by launching a lightweight secondary FDIP thread at a learned miss point following each branch-prediction failure. Across a suite of datacenter workloads, UDP improves IPC by 3.6% on average (up to 16.1%) over a state-of-the-art FDIP baseline, while JUMP improves IPC by 2.0% on average (up to 14.9%). Combined, the two mechanisms substantially close the gap between FDIP and a perfect L1 instruction cache at a storage cost of only a few tens of kilobytes.
Third, this dissertation introduces the Agentic Tax, the first CPU characterization study of agentic AI workloads across three runtime families. The study is packaged as a deterministic-replay benchmark infrastructure that enables repeatable, cycle-level evaluation under controlled conditions. The characterization shows that the orchestration substrate of agentic AI workloads is significantly more frontend-bound than the hyperscale datacenter workloads examined in prior work, and that it introduces new dominant function families with no analog in traditional warehouse-scale systems. These findings motivate two architectural directions proposed as future work: extending UDP and JUMP to optimize the orchestration substrate itself, and designing heterogeneous CPU cores that allocate frontend resources according to the execution phase.
Event Host: Surim Oh, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Heiner Litz
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94753352649?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

BME 280B Seminar: 4th Year Grad Talks
2026-05-28 11:40 - 13:15 | Biomedical Sciences Building, 575 McLaughlin Drive
Please join us for our BME 280B seminar series Thursday (5/28/26) in person at Biomed 200. The event will run from 11:40 AM to 1:15 PM and feature our 4th year grad talks.

11:40AM – 11:50AM: Ivana Pacar
11:53AM – 12:03PM: Jesus Gonzalez Ferrer
12:06PM – 12:16PM: Connor Mattingly
12:19PM – 12:29PM: Samira Vera
12:32PM – 12:42PM: Nick Chu
12:45PM – 12:55PM: Julian Menendez
12:58PM – 1:08PM: Parsa Eskandar

Ortiz Barbosa, D. (CSE) - HARDENING AUTONOMOUS CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS AGAINST ADVERSARIAL CONDITIONS
2026-05-28 12:00 - 14:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 testing frameworks have been developed. How-
ever, existing testing frameworks primarily focus on identifying logical flaws or system
vulnerabilities, often emphasizing static scenarios and paying less attention to an adap-
tive intelligent adversary.
To help reduce this gap, this dissertation develops and applies adaptive, adversary-
aware methodologies to discover, formalize, and mitigate security vulnerabilities in au-
tonomous systems spanning vehicle platooning, drone swarms, and vision-based drone
recovery. We first apply NLP techniques to discover and formalize driving rules across
North American and Australian jurisdictions, identifying possible restriction that an
adversary can exploit. Likewise, these rules can be used to test the adaptability of AVs
to new contexts and to establish a formal basis for context-aware AV testing. Next,
we apply optimization-based adversarial search to both ACC-controlled vehicle pla-
toons and obstacle-avoiding drone swarms. We uncover maneuvers that an adversary
can use against the system that range from crash-inducing patterns against platooning
controllers to herding strategies that divert swarms from their objectives. Finally, to
address the gap regarding the possible solutions to an adversarial attack we explore how
a drone can recover from it by using LVLMs to understand its context and select a safe
landing surface.
Event Host: Diego Ortiz Barbosa, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Alvaro A Cardenas

Yang, D. (CSE) - Inner Monologue: a Pathway to Human-Like Reasoning for Complex Tasks
2026-05-28 13:00 - 15:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
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), a mechanism that enables AI systems to coordinate internal components, acquire external information, and reason through structured intermediate states.
I will first introduce IM as a mechanism for internal coordination in static information systems, where multiple models collaborate within one AI system to solve reasoning tasks. I will then extend IM to dynamic information systems, where AI system is learned to retrieve external information. Finally, I will present how IM can move beyond verbal reasoning toward multimodal thinking, where generated visual states represent the system’s current understanding and support iterative refinement.
Together, this dissertation demonstrates the success and potential of human-inspired Inner Monologue mechanisms for improving complex multi-step reasoning in AI systems.
Event Host: Diji Yang, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Yi Zhang
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99915235963?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Educational Therapy Program Info Session
2026-05-28 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Transform learning
Join Diana Black Kennedy, chair of UCSC Silicon Valley’s Educational Therapy certificate program, to learn how this distinctive program prepares educators and professionals to create meaningful, lasting impact. As one of the few programs approved by the Association of Educational Therapists (AET), it equips you with the skills to assess learning differences and implement research-based, effective interventions with confidence.
Empower students and build your practice
Gain skills to support students with learning differences like dyslexia, ADHD, and autism using therapeutic and educational strategies. Whether you’re working in schools or starting a private practice, this program helps you create individualized plans that foster meaningful progress.
This summer info session is sponsored by the Educational Therapy Program.
Claim your seat today.

Zhou, K. (CSE) - Toward Safer Frontier AI: From Evaluation and Red-Teaming to Alignment and Oversight
2026-05-29 11:00 - 12:30
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 dissertation identifies novel safety risks in frontier multimodal large language models and AI agents, introduces a black-box red-teaming framework for AI agents, proposes new safety alignment algorithms, and builds the first probe-based misalignment monitoring system, developing practical approaches for evaluating, red-teaming, aligning, and overseeing frontier language models and agents. The central conclusion is that responsible AI cannot rest on any single guardrail: capability-scaled evaluation, active red-teaming, training-time alignment, and scalable monitoring together form a coordinated stack for frontier AI safety.
Event Host: Kaiwen Zhou, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Xin Wang
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94196702062?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Qureshi, A. (ECE) - ISoC: A Universal Impedance Spectroscopy Instrument-on-Chip in SKY130 130 nm CMOS
2026-05-29 11:30 - 13:30
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 four standard electrochemical measurement modes and performs Fourier analysis, calibration, and model fitting directly on-chip. The work introduces a new delta-sigma transimpedance amplifier that breaks a long-standing sensitivity–bandwidth tradeoff in current measurement. It also presents the first application of digital predistortion — a technique borrowed from wireless transmitter design — to electrochemical instrumentation, reducing calibration error by more than an order of magnitude. The design is validated through a ten-level verification methodology spanning from transistor-level simulation to FPGA emulation — an approach that uncovered silicon-critical bugs prior to fabrication.
Event Host: Azzam Qureshi, Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: Ken Pedrotti
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93312223921?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Insurance, Risk, and Resilience in a Changing World
2026-05-29 12:00 - 13:30 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/6845462150?pwd=[REDACTED]
Climate change is reshaping every system it touches. This panel examines one that most people haven’t much considered in climate terms: insurance. When the industry built to share risk retreats from it, the consequences fall hardest on communities least able to absorb them. Three panelists examine what that failure looks like from the inside, where financial instruments to do better already exist, and what it would take to build a system designed for the world we are actually in.
UCI’s Simon Penny takes us to the heart of the problem. While for most, the Eaton Fire is a dim memory, Penny is (still) an evacuee. In Jan ‘25, nearly 10,000 buildings burned in the Eaton fire, and a similar number remain contaminated and uninhabitable. Likely the most toxic urban fire in US history, the Eaton Fire is a harbinger of a growing new phenomenon: Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) fires, where plastics and electronics in buildings and vehicles create novel environmental toxins, which in LA were driven across the city by winds of over 100 mph.
Residents are often unaware of the presence of high levels of toxins, carcinogens, and forever chemicals such fires produce. Community members face huge bills for abatement and remediation, while insurance companies issue denials to long-time policyholders and curtail coverage of properties in newly declared “fire zones.” State agencies, similarly, have failed to recognize or respond to the scale of the problem. In the absence of state support, community-activist and citizen-science organizations have emerged to advocate for victims. Simon will offer a firsthand account of what thousands are experiencing, abandoned by insurance companies, multiple state agencies, and the very algorithms of risk and restitution that underpin the entire fragile edifice of property and value.
UCSC’s Mike Beck directs our attention to the coastal risks growing due to climate change, development, and habitat loss. Mike’s team assesses coastal risks, values the adaptation benefits of nature, and identifies innovative solutions to reduce risks to people, property and nature. In identifying innovative solutions, Mike has worked closely with the risk industry to incorporate nature in risk models, develop reef insurance, and new investment opportunities through wetland resilience credits. Mike will describe recent successes in these partnerships as well as shortcomings in public and private progress in risk reduction and climate adaptation efforts.
The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure’s Josh Harrison argues that the insurance industry’s retreat from climate risk is not a market failure but a systems failure, one that reveals how deeply insurance functions as social infrastructure. His talk will examine why the current pricing and underwriting model is structurally blind to prevention, what that blindness costs communities that can least afford it, and what a different institutional architecture might look like.

BME80G Seminar – Katherine Bonini, “Rethinking Familial Risk in Genomic Medicine: Ethical Approaches to Cascade Screening”
2026-05-29 13:20 - 14:25 | Jack Baskin Auditorium, 191 Baskin Cir, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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, healthcare systems in the United States continue to operationalize care at the level of the individual. This tension is especially evident in cascade screening, the process of identifying, notifying, and offering genetic testing to relatives of a proband with a hereditary condition. Cascade screening can enable earlier diagnosis, guide preventive care, and reduce morbidity and mortality, but its implementation raises important ethical questions.
In this talk, we will examine how current approaches to familial risk communication place responsibility on patients to notify relatives, often resulting in incomplete reach and missed opportunities for prevention. We will then consider alternative approaches, including system-led contact models in which health systems directly notify at-risk relatives with proband consent. Drawing on public health ethics frameworks, we will discuss a proposed framework demonstrating how system-led models may be ethically justified when specific criteria are met, including considerations of public input, opt-out mechanisms, and a focus on actionable conditions. This talk will encourage consideration of how genomic care can be structured to better balance individual rights with broader responsibilities to families and public health.

Bio: Katherine (Kate) Bonini, MS, MA, CGC is a Senior Genetic Counselor and Core Faculty member in the Institute for Genomic Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her work focuses on the ethical, legal, and social implications of integrating emerging genomic technologies into clinical care, with particular emphasis on implementation science and equitable translation of genomic advances into practice. She has contributed to several major NHGRI-funded initiatives, including the Clinical Sequencing Evidence-Generating Research (CSER) Consortium, the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, and the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC).
Kate is an active leader within the National Society of Genetic Counselors, where she previously served as Chair of the Research Special Interest Group and Chair of the Public Policy Committee. She is also a member of the Mount Sinai Clinical Ethics Committee, where she contributes to institutional discussions on complex ethical issues in patient care and research.
She received her MS in Genetic Counseling and MA in Medical Humanities and Bioethics from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Hosted by: Professor Karen Miga, BME Department

Zhu, R. (ECE) - From Neuromorphic Principles to Efficient Neural Language Architectures
2026-05-29 14:00 - 16:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 looped language models, the dissertation develops practical approaches for bounded-memory and bounded-compute language modeling. The central conclusion is that recurrent state, temporal decay, sparse computation, and parameter reuse can provide useful design principles for scalable language models, even when they are abstracted beyond literal biological spiking.
Event Host: Ridger Zhu, Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: Jason Eshraghian
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96672322005?pwd=[REDACTED]

Making an Exoneree Showcase
2026-05-29 18:00 - 21:30 | Digital Arts Research Center, 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Audiences are invited to Making an Exoneree, a reception and film screening featuring the premiere of five student-made short documentaries that reveal the facts—and falsehoods—of wrongful conviction cases from around the country. Over the Winter and Spring quarters, 15 UCSC undergraduate students in the Making an Exoneree course dedicated themselves to uncovering the truth about these cases. The final short films unravel the unjust convictions of Aaron Addison, Dennis Littleton, Ken Middleton, Frank Perkins, and Taunee Smith, who have spent a combined 126 years in prison.The students hope that by sharing these stories, they can help correct this injustice and bring innocent people home.
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ADVISORIES
– Mature themes or content, No intermission, Strong language.
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
– Attend in person or online
– ONLINE LINK HERE
– Reception at 6:00 p.m.
– Screenings at 7:00 p.m.
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PARKING
– Arts Lot #126 is the closest parking lot to the event.
– $5 ParkMobile Arts Special Event flat rate; cash/credit via parking attendant when present in the lot; or by valid UCSC permit.
– Before arriving to UCSC, we recommend downloading the ParkMobile App on Google Play or Apple App Store and setting up a profile with license plate and payment information.
– Visitors with DMV placards or plates may park for free in DMV spaces, Medical spaces, or ParkMobile spaces without additional payment, or in timed zones for longer than the posted time.
– UCSC affiliates must get their permits in advance; attendants will only sell non-affiliate rates
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services.
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.
