A Conversation on Black Ecologies
2025-10-23 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | Rachel Carson College, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the Sociology Department together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), The Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethic Studies in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to welcome speakers Tianna Bruno and Justin Hosbey (UC Berkeley) for a conversation on Black Ecologies.
Tianna Bruno is an Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley.
Justin Hosbey is an Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley.
Lindsey Dillon is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.
This event is part of a series co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) together with the Sociology Department, The Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Road Trip! Light in the American West, from Baja to the Yukon
2025-10-23 12:00 - 17:00, 2025-10-24 12:00 - 17:00, 2025-10-25 12:00 - 17:00, 2025-10-27 12:00 - 17:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The photographs in this exhibition, made between 2004 and 2025, span across the American West from the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico to The Yukon territory in Canada. Paul Schoellhamer’s (Cowell ‘69) color photographs invite us to travel with him and reflect on our relationship to land, the light that shapes it, and the freedom – contested but essential – to move across it.
The exhibition draws on voices across time and perspective that frame the American landscape as more than a stage for beauty and awe. For Chief Satanta of the Kiowa Nation, to roam the land freely was life itself. For N. Scott Momaday, land must be “believed to be seen.” For Eliot Porter, light and reflection imparted magic to Glen Canyon’s waters. For Wallace Stegner, saving natural places meant saving fragments of our collective sanity. For Brook M. Thompson, the Klamath River is recognized with personhood. Alongside these perspectives, Paul’s images press us to see public land not as scenery to extract or aestheticize, but as sustenance and history. Land is alive and contested. To see closely is not to linger on a romanticized vision of the American landscape, but to reckon with responsibility: how we safeguard access, how we imagine “wildness,” and how we hold space for futures beyond our own. For Paul, this exhibition is a call for students to encounter land and light firsthand and let those encounters be their teachers.
Opening Reception
October 4, 2025
1-4pm
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Join us every Friday for Art Fridays.
No experience necessary. Supplies and snacks provided.

Sep 26 Snail Mail/Postcards
Oct 3 Souvenir Keychains
Oct 10 Stamp Magnets
Oct 17 Cyanotype Totebags/Pouches/Pencil cases
Oct 24 Candy Around The World Linocuts
Oct 31 Abstract Felt Collages
Nov 7 Phone Photos/Buttons
Nov 14 Travel Related Patches With Upcycled Materials
Nov 21 Thanksgiving Break! No Art Friday
Nov 28 Unexpected Landscape Surrealist Collage

Please note that the date and the project is subject to change.

Behavioral, Econometrics and Theory Seminar Series Presents: Kevin Chen
2025-10-23 13:40 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Economics Behavioral, Econometrics, & Theory Seminar
Date: Thursday, October 23, 2025
Time: 1:40-3:00 p.m.
Location: Engineering 2, Rm 499

Speaker: Kevin Chen
Title: Assistant Professor of Economics
Affiliation: Stanford University
Host: Michael Leung

Seminar title: Compound Selection Decisions: An Almost SURE Approach

ABSTRACT: This paper proposes methods for producing compound selection decisions in a Gaussian sequence model. Given unknown, fixed parameters µ_{1:n} and known σ_{1:n} with observations Yᵢ ∼ 𝒩(μᵢ, σᵢ²), the aim is to select a subset of units S to maximize utility Σ_{i∈S}(μᵢ − Kᵢ) for known costs Kᵢ. Inspired by Stein’s unbiased risk estimate (SURE), we introduce an almost unbiased estimator, ASSURE, for the expected utility of a proposed decision rule. ASSURE allows a user to choose a welfare-maximizing rule from a pre-specified class by optimizing the estimated welfare, thereby producing selection decisions that borrow strength across noisy estimates. We show that ASSURE yields decision rules that are asymptotically no worse than the optimal but infeasible rule in the pre-specified class. We apply ASSURE to p-value decision procedures in A/B testing, selecting Census tracts for economic opportunity, and identifying discriminating firms.

Successful Slug Workshop: Campus Community & Student Success (on Zoom!)
2025-10-23 14:00 - 15:00
Campus Community & Student Success
Thursday, October 23, 2:05 p.m.– 2:50 p.m.
Location: Zoom
Learn how to get involved with the campus community and how it supports student success.
Successful Slug Workshop Series
Join Learning Support Services (LSS) for Successful Slug Workshops on Mondays at 11:40 a.m. and Wednesdays at 2:05 p.m.
These 45-minute workshops are open to all UCSC students and offer tools and strategies to support your academic success. Each session highlights best practices for effective, long-lasting learning and is led by LSS professional staff.
To get first priority, sign up on TutorHub or simply drop in. You can also sign up on TutorHub to receive email reminders.
Learn more and sign up: learningsupport.ucsc.edu/programs/workshops/

You Belong Here: The programs and services described here are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities.
To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

Robots that Know What They Do Not Know: Assured AI-enabled Autonomy in Unknown Environments
2025-10-23 14:00 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Speaker: Yiannis Kantaros, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Systems Engineering at WashU in St. Louis.
Title: Robots that Know What They Do Not Know: Assured AI-enabled Autonomy in Unknown Environments.
Time: Thursday, Oct 23rd, 2025, 2:00-3:00 pm.
Location: E2-553 or Zoom.
Abstract: Designing robots that navigate unfamiliar environments to execute natural language (NL) commands is a cornerstone of advanced embodied intelligence. While recent AI-enabled architectures have made impressive empirical progress, they often lack introspection, leading to systems that act with unwarranted confidence, unaware of their own limitations or whether they have successfully completed their tasks. As a result, these systems offer limited performance and safety guarantees, restricting their deployment in safety-critical settings.
In this talk, I will present an introspective, neuro-symbolic autonomy architecture that enables robots to complete NL tasks in unknown environments with assurance guarantees by explicitly quantifying their own uncertainty using uncertainty quantification (UQ) tools. The neural component employs large language models (LLMs) to translate NL commands into temporal logic specifications, while leveraging conformal prediction, a UQ tool, to calibrate and quantify prediction uncertainty arising from LLM imperfections and potential NL ambiguity. When uncertainty exceeds user-defined thresholds, uncertainty-aware feedback is solicited from auxiliary LLMs—or, if necessary, from human operators. We provide theoretical guarantees, supported by empirical case studies, that the proposed uncertainty-aware translation framework, called ConformalNL2LTL, achieves user-specified translation success rates under certain distributional settings. The symbolic component generates plans for mobile robots with AI-enabled perception systems to satisfy temporal logic tasks while explicitly reasoning over perceptual and environmental uncertainty. This allows robots to decide when to proceed confidently and when to actively gather additional sensor data, ensuring task completion with the desired probability. Notably, the developed planners are agnostic to specific sensor models or noise characteristics. The talk will conclude with case studies and demonstrations, followed by a discussion of limitations and open problems.
Speaker Bio: Yiannis Kantaros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), St. Louis, MO, USA. He earned a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2012 from the University of Patras, Greece, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University, Durham, NC, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Prior to joining WashU, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. His current research interests include machine learning, distributed control and optimization, and formal methods with applications in robotics. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2nd IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP) in 2014 and was a finalist for the Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2024 and a finalist for the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-physical Systems (CPSWeek-ICCPS) in 2025. He also received the 2017-18 Outstanding Dissertation Research Award from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University and a 2024 NSF CAREER Award.

Wiki-a-thon Supporting BIPOC Scientists
2025-10-23 14:00 - 17:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join us for an afternoon of creating and editing pages for BIPOC scientists, engineers, and technologists! Wikipedia overwhelmingly recognizes the achievements of white people. This wiki-a-thon works to reverse this trend, highlighting the often overlooked accomplishments of BIPOC leaders in science and technology, and ensuring that the next generation can see role models who look like them.
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY – RSVPs appreciated
We will provide a list of scientists who don’t yet have pages, or you can come up with your own! The event will begin with a short training on how to edit Wikipedia, followed by time to write your own article on a scientist, engineer, or technologist of your choice.
When: Thursday, October 23 from 2-5pm. Come for the whole time or just an hour or two!
Where: E2-506 and Zoom (RSVP for link)
Who: All students, faculty, and staff are welcome to attend!
Snacks and drinks will be provided!
Read more about our inspiration.

College Night: 831 Night Market
2025-10-23 17:00 - 20:00 | Cowell/Stevenson Dining Hall, 520 Cowell-Stevenson Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Cowell and Stevenson Colleges, in collaboration with UCSC Dining, present the first College Night of the year! Join us Thursday, October 23, from 5–8 p.m. at the Cowell/Stevenson Dining Hall for a night of activities, fun, community, and a special themed menu. Standard dining hall entry pricing applies, and all students, faculty, and staff are invited.
Please note: The dining hall will be closed from 2–5 p.m. for event preparation.
Learn more about College Nights at dining.ucsc.edu/events.
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You Belong Here: The programs and services described here are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities.
To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.How to Use the Statement Across Communication Channels

From Campus to Career - Tara Hernandez VP, Developer Productivity at MongoDB
2025-10-23 17:30 - 19:00 | CA
Join us this October 23rd for an enlightening conversation with Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB!
In this casual conversation, Tara will share lessons learned from their illustrious career in software engineering infrastructure. With stints at companies like Netscape, Mozilla, Pixar, Google, MongoDB, and more, you’ll come away with some highly useful insight on how to navigate a successful career in tech!
This is an excellent opportunity to gain valuable perspective from a fellow Slug that has an extraordinary real world perspective.
Don’t miss this highly informative talk!
If you have disability-related needs, please contact the Career Success office at csuccess@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-4420 as soon as possible.
YOU BELONG HERE
Programs and services are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities. To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

Mary Roach - Replaceable You
2025-10-23 19:00 - 20:00 | London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes #1 New York Times bestselling author Mary Roach for a discussion about Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. In this irrepressible new work, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body’s failings. When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?

The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what’s available–sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we’re attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet? Irrepressible and accessible, Replaceable You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Mary Roach is the author of seven best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives in California.

Innovations in Health Care Virtual Conference
2025-10-24 09:00 - 11:00 | CA
💫 Transform Healthcare with Us! 🧬🏥
🌟 5-Day Virtual Summit 2025: “Innovation, Ethics & the Next Frontier in Healthcare” 🌟
🗓️ Oct 20–24 | 9–11AM PST
💻 100% FREE | Live Online
Meet visionary leaders shaping the future of healthcare:
✨ Prof. Henry Greely
✨ Dr. James Giordano
✨ Lisa Berkley, PhD
✨ Alice Rathjen
✨ Christine Von Raesfeld
✨ Linda MacDonald Glenn, JD, LLM
🤝 Co-hosted by Krzysztof “Kris” Laudanski, President of @SHCI
Join the movement redefining innovation and ethics in modern medicine! 🌍💫
Register at https://www.linkedin.com/company/theshci/posts/
💡 #HealthTechRevolution #EthicalInnovation #FutureOfHealthcare #MedTech2025 #SHCI
🙌 Ready to be part of the change? Drop a comment below!

Science & Justice Training Program Informational Meeting
2025-10-24 14:00 - 15:00 | Register at: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u6h-cJvDQBiscaNIJpzVUw
Join the Science & Justice Research Center on Friday, October 24th at 2PM on Zoom for an Informational Meeting on our internationally recognized interdisciplinary Graduate Training and Certificate Program.
Register at: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u6h-cJvDQBiscaNIJpzVUw.
Our Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) is a globally unique initiative that trains doctoral students to work across the disciplinary boundaries of the natural and social sciences, engineering, humanities and the arts. Through the SJTP we at UC Santa Cruz currently teach new generations of PhD students the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical deliberation, and public communication. Students in the program design collaborative research projects oriented around questions of science and justice. These research projects not only contribute to positive outcomes in the wider world, they also become the templates for new forms of problem-based and collaborative inquiry within and beyond the university.
As SJTP students graduate they take the skills and experience they gained in the training program into the next stage of their career in universities, industry, non-profits, and government.
Opportunities include graduate Certificate Program, experience organizing and hosting colloquia series about the research projects, mentorship, potential for additional research funding and training in conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersections of science and society.
WINTER 2026 / WINTER 2027 COURSE SERIES:
Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration, taught by Associate Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies Kriti Sharma is scheduled for Tuesday’s 1:00-4:00 pm. Science and Justice Research Seminar will be offered in Winter 2027. Enrollment in the courses is required for participating in the Training Program. Attending the informational meeting is strongly encouraged, but not required.
Students from all disciplines are encouraged to attend. Prior graduate fellows have come from every campus Division and have represented 24 departments.
Past collaborative research projects have included:

Physicists working with small scale farmers to develop solar greenhouses scaled to local farming needs.
Colloquia about the social and political consequences of scientific uncertainties surrounding topics such as climate change research, food studies, genomics and identity.
Examining how art can empower justice movements.
Working with local publics to improve African fishery science.

For more information on the Science & Justice Training Program, visit: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/about-sjrc/sjtp/.

Campus Debt is a Labor Issue
2025-10-24 14:00 - 16:00 | Rachel Carson College, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the Center for Labor and Community on Friday, October 24, from 2-4pm at the Rachel Carson Red Room for a conversation on campus debt, austerity, and labor organizing in higher education.
Drawing from his book, Lend and Rule: Fighting Shadow Financialization of Public Universities (2024), Jason Wozniak, of the Debt Collective and the Coalition Against Campus Debt, will describe how institutional debt drives the erosion of public higher education and disciplines labor.
This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP today!

Preparing for Graduate School Applications
2025-10-24 16:00 - 17:00 | Bay Tree Building, Student Union, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Join us to get an overview of the timeline for applying to graduate school and the common application components. We will share resources on writing personal statements and statements of purpose, requesting letters of recommendation, and more.
We will provide captions for the presentation. If you have disability-related needs, please contact the Career Success office at csuccess@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-4420 as soon as possible.
YOU BELONG HERE
Programs and services are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities. To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

Elevate Your Interviews: Strategies for Success
2025-10-25 09:00 - 16:30 | CA
Job interviews can be challenging, even for seasoned professionals. Preparation and practice are key. This one-day workshop for the PMI Silicon Valley Chapter, led by communications coach Karen Schiff, will teach you the skills you need to ace your next interview.
Throughout the day, you’ll learn how to craft your responses, both the organization and the content, so you sound clear and look confident. Practice with your peers and get personalized feedback from Karen in a supportive space. You’ll leave with actionable insights and a toolkit of techniques to set you apart from the competition.
Learning Outcomes:

Structure. Find out which speaking structures are the most effective for different question types
Content. Learn the most impressive content to use in your responses to seven key questions.
Presentation. See how to look and sound your best on video, phone, and in person.

Registration

Student Discount: UCSC Extension students receive 50% off registration.
Early bird registration: $200 for members, $250 for non-members
Regular registration: $250 for members, $300 for non-members

This event is co-sponsored by the UCSC Silicon Valley Professional Education Project and Program Management certificate program.

Welcome to the City: East Bay
2025-10-25 13:00 - 15:00 | CityTeam Oakland, 722 Washington Street, Oakland, 94607, United States
Join us for Welcome to the City in East Bay, hosted in partnership with CityTeam Oakland. The project will be held Saturday, October 25 from 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. at 722 Washington St, Oakland, CA 94607. Please register in advance to help us and our non-profit partner plan accordingly.
Project Description:
Sorting and organizing donated clothing for community members in need.
Welcome to the City is an annual series of regional events which help alumni connect with their local UCSC community. While the program is designed with recent grads in mind, all are welcome to participate.
Please contact alumni@ucsc.edu with questions.

Noche de Recuerdos
2025-10-25 16:00 - 19:00 | Stevenson Event Center, Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join us for Noche de Recuerdos—an evening of remembrance, celebration, and community. Enjoy a screening of Coco at 5 p.m., Kahoot prizes, hot chocolate, pan de muerto, face painting, lotería, ofrendas, and more!
All are welcome. Come together to celebrate life and memory. 💐
Questions or accommodation requests: cwprogra@ucsc.edu
You Belong Here: The programs and services described here are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities.
To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

Barnstorm Presents: 24-Hour Theater
2025-10-25 19:30 - 21:30 | Theater Arts Center, 453 Kerr Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Using a random prompt, actors and a production team stage a fully-fledged production that is produced, blocked, and presented to an audience in just 24 hours. Audiences are invited to attend the culminating presentation on Saturday, October 25.
ABOUT BARNSTORM
UC Santa Cruz students experiment with and create their own innovative theater and gain a sense of operating and creating art in the Barnstorm Theater Company, a student-run theater arts production company established in 2004.
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ADVISORIES
– Event update: the correct date for this performance is Sat., Oct. 25, not Fri., Oct. 24 as originally listed.
– Ticket holders not seated at least 10 minutes before the advertised start time may forfeit their ticket/seat and no refund will be issued.
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ADMISSION
– Tickets issued through Eventbrite; Follow the Dept. of Performance, Play & Design on Eventbrite for notifications and updates.
– Free for UCSC undergraduate students (ticket required).
– General admission “Pay What You Like” options $5–20
– A limited number of tickets/seats may be available at the door, even after online ticket sales end or reach full capacity.
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
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PARKING
– Parking by 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.

Santa Cruz Pickwick Club presents: Bleak House
2025-10-26 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
Spontaneous human combustion! Evil lawyers! Detectives! Family intrigue! These all come together in Charles Dickens’s masterwork, Bleak House. This year, we will spend the year reading the 2026 Dickens Universe novel. Join Dickens enthusiasts and Pickwick Club members on Zoom for a series of discussions about this beloved book.
Register via Zoom
Reading Schedule:

OCT 26: Chapters 8-13
NOV 23: Chapters 14-19
DEC 28: No meeting
JAN 25: Chapters 20-25
FEB 22: Chpaters 26-32
MAR 22: Chapters 33-38
APR 26: Chapters 39-46
MAY 24: Chapters 47-53
JUN 28: Chapters 54-67 (End)

Recommended Edition: We recommend the Penguin Classics edition of the novel for its appendices and notes, but other versions are fine. First-time readers should avoid the Introduction if they don’t want spoilers. Download the novel to read at Gutenburg.org or listen to it at LibriVox.org.
The Santa Cruz Pickwick (Book) Club, a branch of the Dickens Fellowship, is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. The Santa Cruz Public Libraries provide support for the reading group.

Echoes on the Hill
2025-10-26 20:30 - 21:30 | Colleges Nine and John R. Lewis College Multi-purpose Room, 615 College Nine Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join us for a night of live music and campus energy at the JRL MPR Stage! This recurring showcase celebrates the incredible talent of UC Santa Cruz’s student-led bands, bringing the community together through sound, creativity, and Slug spirit.
This edition features Empire Grade, a high-energy punk band making waves in the UCSC music scene. Come out to support your fellow Slugs, discover new artists, and enjoy an evening of authentic student talent and connection.

You Belong Here: The programs and services described here are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities.
To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

ECE 290 Seminar: Performance Bounds and Bottlenecks for Neuromorphic ML Accelerators
2025-10-27 10:40 - 11:45 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Jason Yik, PhD Candidate, Harvard SEAS
Description: Recent research on neuromorphic accelerators has investigated their efficiency and performance benefits for machine learning (ML) inference at the edge. This talk will focus on the performance implications of the fully-on-chip, manycore-distributed memory architecture used by current neuromorphic accelerators. In conventional architectures, the roofline model is a well-known performance model for denoting performance bounds and bottlenecks. For neuromorphics, we show that bounds create a different shape, a floorline, and we demonstrate how to optimize ML deployment using the floorline as a performance guide.
Bio: Jason Yik is a PhD candidate at Harvard SEAS, with a research focus in neuromorphic computing architectures. His prior work includes designing benchmark frameworks and tools for neuromorphic research, and modeling and optimizing neuromorphic system performance. Currently, he is an intern with the ASIC architecture team at Cerebras Systems.
Hosted by: Professor Soumya Bose, ECE Department
Zoom Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97975378707?pwd=[REDACTED]
Room: E2-192

BIPOC Outdoors: Fall Garden Tour
2025-10-27 12:00 | Stevenson Community Garden, Stevenson College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the People of Color Sustainability Collective for our annual Fall Garden Tour! This event was created to give students of color an opportunity to explore green spaces around campus and be in community with one another. The first part of the day will consist of students taking a walking tour through several campus gardens, beginning at Stevenson Garden and ending the tour at Oakes College, where we will eat free food, play games, listen to music, and get to know one another in the sunshine. This supports the PoCSC's goal of providing students of color with community building opportunities, and representing BIPOC sustainability practices.

Statistics Seminar: Sampling Depth Trade-Off in Function Estimation Under a Two-Level Design
2025-10-27 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Presenter: Akira Horiguchi, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis
Description: Many modern statistical applications involve a two-level sampling scheme that first samples subjects from a population and then samples observations on each subject. These schemes often are designed to learn both the population-level functional structures shared by the subjects and the functional characteristics specific to individual subjects. Common wisdom suggests that learning population-level structures benefits from sampling more subjects whereas learning subject-specific structures benefits from deeper sampling within each subject. Oftentimes these two objectives compete for limited sampling resources, which raises the question of how to optimally sample at the two levels. We quantify such sampling-depth trade-offs by establishing the L_2 minimax risk rates for learning the population-level and subject-specific structures under a hierarchical Gaussian process model framework where we consider a Bayesian and a frequentist perspective on the unknown population-level structure. These rates provide general lessons for designing two-level sampling schemes given a fixed sampling budget. Interestingly, they show that subject-specific learning occasionally benefits more by sampling more subjects than by deeper within-subject sampling. We show that the corresponding minimax rates can be readily achieved in practice through simple adaptive estimators without assuming prior knowledge on the underlying variability at the two sampling levels. We validate our theory and illustrate the sampling trade-off in practice through both simulation experiments and two real datasets. While we carry out all the theoretical analysis in the context of Gaussian process models for analytical tractability, the results provide insights on effective two-level sampling designs more broadly.
Bio: Akira Horiguchi is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Davis. He was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University, advised by Professors Li Ma and Cliburn Chan. He completed his Ph.D. in Statistics at The Ohio State University, advised by Professors Matthew T. Pratola and Thomas J. Santner. His research interests include improving nonparametric inference for flow cytometry data, developing sensitivity analysis tools for regression trees, and developing tree-based methods for tensor regression.
Hosted by: Professor Paul Parker

AM Seminar: Why do we care about inertial waves on the Sun?
2025-10-27 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Presenter: Ms. Catherine Blume, University of Colorado-Boulder
Description: Recent observations of Rossby waves and other inertial oscillations in the Sun’s convection zone have kindled the hope that such waves might be used as a seismic probe of the Sun’s interior. Here, we present a 3D numerical simulation in spherical geometry that models the Sun’s convection zone and upper radiative interior. This model features a wide variety of inertial oscillations, including both sectoral and tesseral Rossby waves, retrograde mixed inertial modes, prograde thermal Rossby waves, and the recently observed high-frequency retrograde (HFR) vorticity modes. In this talk, we’ll explore these different waves, their physical impact, and their potential helioseismic utility.
Bio: Catherine Blume is an astrophysics PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she works with Brad Hindman studying solar inertial waves.
Hosted by: Professor Julie Simons

Julian Brave NoiseCat - We Survived the Night
2025-10-27 19:00 - 20:00 | London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Julian Brave NoiseCat who will share his stunning debut We Survived the Night. Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. Soulful, formally daring, indelible work from an important new voice.
This event is cosponsored by the American Indian Resource Center and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. It will take place at the London Nelson Community Center.

“Written in gorgeous, sparse prose, We Survived the Night reads like a novel. Told with a blistering honesty, the truth and grit create a beautifully woven coyote story we haven’t heard before. This is a love letter to Oakland, to the Canim Lake Band Tsq’secen of the Secwepemc Nation, to a father from his son, to the act of being a Native person in the twenty first century finding ways to love even through all that wounds have opened and wrought. With this, Julian Brave NoiseCat has written a book I’ve been waiting my whole life to read.” —Tommy Orange
A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today—We Survived the Night (Knopf) interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.
Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, he and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his father’s absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, by extension, himself.
Years later, NoiseCat sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land, as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. NoiseCat has been recognized with numerous awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize and many National Native Media Awards. He was a finalist for the Livingston Award and multiple Canadian National Magazine Awards, and was named to the TIME100 Next list in 2021. His first documentary, Sugarcane, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Directed alongside Emily Kassie, Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in U.S. Documentary. NoiseCat is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq̓éscen̓ and descendant of the Líl̓wat Nation of Mount Currie. We Survived the Night is his first book.

Alatawi, A. (ECE) - Learning-Based Channel Estimation for Next-Generation Wireless Communications
2025-10-28 10:00 - 12:00
Accurate Channel State Information (CSI) is critical for coherent detection, equalization, and adaptive resource allocation in modern wireless systems. Traditional estimators rely on stationary statistical models, and many learning-based methods assume training and deployment conditions are matched. In practice, these assumptions break down under user mobility and environmental dynamics, leading to degraded performance. This proposal explores machine-learning approaches for channel estimation that address two complementary challenges.
First, we develop an adaptive deep neural network (ADNN) for single-input single-output links over slowly time-varying channels. The method converts readily available physical-layer feedback—cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and automatic repeat request (ARQ)—into reliable self-supervision. Specifically, packets decoded without errors are re-estimated using least squares (LS) across all symbols to generate high-quality labels, and the DNN weights are periodically updated online. This design eliminates the need for ground-truth labels at deployment and enables continual learning. Simulations show that the ADNN tracks distributional shifts and recovers near–linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE) performance in both mean-square error (MSE) and symbol error rate (SER), whereas a fixed offline-trained DNN degrades as channel statistics change.
Second, we propose a sequence-to-sequence LSTM estimator for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). The model exploits both temporal and frequency correlation by taking LS pilot estimates from several previous OFDM blocks as input and reconstructing the full channel frequency response of the current block. Trained on realistic time-selective channels such as WINNER II, the LSTM outperforms LS interpolation and recent super-resolution–based methods across a wide range of SNRs, pilot densities, and temporal window sizes.
Finally, the proposal outlines future research on semantic-aware channel estimation using CSI timeliness, and enhanced sequence models with DNN-refined pilots, whole-block inputs, and efficient GRU architectures.
Event Host: Abdulaziz Alatawi, Ph.D. Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: Hamid Sadjadpour & Zouheir Rezki
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94895993579?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 884927

CSE Colloquium: A Journey from Programming Systems Research to AI Agents
2025-10-28 11:00 - 12:15 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Speaker: Koushik Sen, UC Berkeley and Google DeepMind
Abstract: Coding has emerged as an important application area for large language models (LLMs), with a proliferation of code-specific models and their applications across various domains and tasks such as program repair, performance optimization, debugging, test generation, documentation, and security hardening. In this talk, I will describe how we built powerful coding agents such as R2E-Gym and DeepSWE using test-driven methodology for solving various kinds of coding tasks, such as repair, optimization, security vulnerability detection, and refactoring. I will also discuss a novel technique, called GEPA, for domain-specific optimization of AI agent systems, which has shown a significant advantage over reinforcement learning.
Bio: Koushik Sen is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interest lies in Software Engineering, Programming Languages, and AI. He is interested in developing software tools and methodologies that improve programmer productivity and software quality. He is known for his work on “DART: Directed Automated Random Testing,” concolic testing, and LiveCodeBench. He has received a NSF CAREER Award in 2008, a Haifa Verification Conference (HVC) Award in 2009, a IFIP TC2 Manfred Paul Award for Excellence in Software: Theory and Practice in 2010, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2011, a Professor R. Narasimhan Lecture Award in 2014, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2015, and an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award in 2019. He has won several ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. He received the C.L. and Jane W-S. Liu Award in 2004, the C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award in 2005, and the David J. Kuck Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award in 2007, and a Distinguished Alumni Educator Award in 2014 from the UIUC Department of Computer Science. He holds a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in CS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hosted by: Professor Mohsen Lesani
Location: Engineering 2, E2-180 (Refreshments such as coffee and pastries will be provided.)
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

2025 Graduate & Professional School Fair (DAY 1)
2025-10-28 11:00 - 14:00 | Stevenson Event Center, Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
You’re invited to join us, open to all majors!
Undergraduate and graduate students and recent alumni interested in pursuing continuing education opportunities are invited to attend. Get the chance to meet admission representatives seeking to share insight into their respective graduate and professional school programs and discuss ways in which to stand out in the application process.
YOU BELONG HERE
Programs and services are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities. To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.
You will receive registration and additional information to your email from Career Success via Handshake. Please make sure to check your junk/spam folder if you are not receiving any communication.
Questions? Send to csuccess@ucsc.edu or visit Career Success at Hahn 125 East Entrance
Need accessibility support? Let us know at slugtalent@ucsc.edu at least two weeks prior to the fair date.
