Events

Western Regional Hub: Undergraduate Success Group Meeting
2025-12-02 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Members of the hub’s working group focused on Undergraduate student success will meet to share ideas and strategize.
If you would like to be involved in the hub’s work, please contact Richard Raygoza at riraygoz@ucsc.edu

Women's Basketball Fundraiser at Woodstock's
2025-12-02 12:00 - 21:00 | Woodstock’s Pizza, 710 Front St, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Support UCSC Women’s Basketball! Join us at Woodstock’s Pizza on Dec. 2 from noon – 9 p.m. for a delicious way to give back!

How to participate: Just mention the Women’s Basketball fundraiser when ordering in person or use code UCSCWBALL for online orders.

Why it matters: 20% of all proceeds from your purchase will go directly to supporting the UCSC Women’s Basketball team—helping fund travel, gear, and program needs.

Bring your friends, grab some pizza, and help our Slugs shine this season!

Gingerbread House Decorating
2025-12-02 14:00 - 16:00 | CA
Create the house of your dreams while hangin’ with friends and Provost Aims McGuinness.

UC Santa Cruz Comprehensive Habitat Conservation Plan Informational Webinar
2025-12-02 17:30 - 18:30 | CA
Please join us to learn more about the UC Santa Cruz Comprehensive Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP).
The Campus Planning Department is hosting an upcoming informational webinar about the proposed Comprehensive Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for the Main Residential Campus, Westside Research Park and the Coastal Science Campus on Tuesday, December 2, 2025.
The informational webinar will provide information to the campus and community regarding the proposed Comprehensive Habitat Conservation Plan, its goals, and how it will guide future conservation and planning efforts at UC Santa Cruz. The webinar will include a presentation followed by an opportunity for participants to ask questions.

Event: UC Santa Cruz Comprehensive HCP Informational Webinar
Date & Time: Tuesday, December 2, 2025 at 5:30 pm
Location: Online (Zoom link provided once registered)
Registration: HCP Webinar

Megha Majumdar - A Guardian and a Thief
2025-12-02 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Megha Majumdar (A Burning) who will share her electrifying new novel that has recently been long-listed for the National Book Award and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist. A Guardian and a Thief, a piercing and propulsive tour de force, is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families trying to protect their children must battle one another.
RSVP here!
Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She is the former editor in chief of Catapult Books, and lives in New York. A Guardian and A Thief is her second novel.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Megha Majumdar
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

NLP MS Virtual Information Session
2025-12-02 19:00 - 20:00
Interested in a career in generative AI? Join us Dec. 2 from 7 – 8 PM for our Virtual Information Session. Learn more about our program, based at the UCSC Silicon Valley Campus, where you can earn your NLP MS in as little as 15 months. We offer:

Application fee waivers for UCSC students and alumni
Full and partial scholarships
Dedicated careers services support
Internship and research opportunities

Registration required: bit.ly/4nYyssJ

Operation Unplug! Pledge to Leave Campus Sustainability this Winter Break
2025-12-03 00:00 - 2026-01-01 23:59, 2025-12-04 00:00 - 2026-01-02 23:59, 2025-12-05 00:00 - 2026-01-03 23:59 | CA
UCSC Energy Management and the Sustainability Office are leading the first annual “Operation Unplug” campaign to conserve energy (and reduce greenhouse gas emissions) during winter break. Before leaving your residence hall, apartment, or office, please unplug any fridges or minifridges, computers and/or monitors, power strips, and all other energy intensive appliances or equipment! Take the pledge and/or upload a photo of what you unplugged to the campaign’s google form for raffle entries to win one of two $50 gift certificates. Recruit your friends and coworkers for an additional entry each and try to be the winning building (the building with the most participants is guaranteed one raffle winner)! Operation Unplug is open to all students, staff, and faculty. Be the slug that pulls the plug!

Free Coffee, Tea, & More with Merrill Provost Aims McGuinness
2025-12-03 09:00 - 11:00 | CA
Grab a free cup of locally owned coffee and chat with Provost Aims at Coffee with the Provost! Most Wednesdays through the quarter from 9–11 a.m.
Meet us for coffee, tea, breakfast snacks and good conversation outside the Merrill College Office, across from the mailroom.

When Less is More: Applications of Type-Based Underapproximate Reasoning
2025-12-03 11:00 - 12:30 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Suresh Jagganathan, Purdue University

Abstract:
Unlike program verifiers, symbolic execution and property-based testing tools underapproximate program behavior: they aim to report only real bugs (no false positives), at the cost of potentially missing some (false negatives). Recent work has sought to place such tools on a more formal footing, primarily through the development of incorrectness logics that capture a program’s ‘must’ rather than ‘may’ behavior. This talk explores how to transplant these ideas of underapproximation into an expressive refinement type system. Our development enables us to:

(a) Typecheck the completeness of property-based testing (PBT) generators, ensuring that a well-typed generator produces all values (i.e., fully covers) its output type;

(b) Synthesize effectful generators by extending the type system to model underapproximations of sequences of effects rather than just values; and

(c) Guide symbolic execution in effectful functional programs, prioritizing execution paths capable of falsifying data structure safety properties.

Our results demonstrate that viewing types through the lens of underapproximation offers a principled foundation for designing, implementing, and reasoning about program analyzers and test generators, significantly improving their reliability and practical utility in the process.

Bio:
Suresh Jagannathan is the Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. His interests span functional programming, program verification, distributed and concurrent systems, and trustworthy machine learning. In recent years, he has spent time as an Amazon Scholar, a program manager at the Information Innovoation Office (I2O) at DARPA, and a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. He serves an Associate Editor of ACM TOPLAS, and has served as both General and PC Chair of POPL (ACM Symposium on Programming Languages).

Hosted by: Professor Mohsen Lesani

Location: E2-180
*Refreshments such as coffee and pastries will be provided

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

Applied Microeconomics and Trade Seminar Series presents: Matt Weinberg
2025-12-03 11:50 - 13:10 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Applied Microeconomics and Trade Seminar
Date: Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Time: 11:50am – 1:10 p.m.
Location: E2-499

Speaker: Matt Weinberg
Title: Professor of Economics
Affiliation: Ohio State University
Host: Jon Robinson

Seminar title: Oligopsony and Collective Bargaining: Evidence from K-12 Teachers

ABSTRACT: Employers facing limited labor market competition may suppress wages below socially optimal levels. Unions can counteract this wage suppression through collective bargaining, though the may also push wages above the socially optimal level. To assess these forces, we estimate a structural model of labor supply, labor demand, and Nashin-Nash bargaining over wages between teacher unions and school districts in Pennsylvania’s K-12 public school system from 2013 to 2020. Using the estimated parameters, we compare negotiated equilibrium wages and employment to the pure oligopsony scenario and the social planner scenario. On average, pure oligopsony reduces wages 16 percent below the social optimum, while collective bargaining raises wages by 9 percent above the optimum. This average masks substantial district-level heterogeneity driven by variation in bargaining power. Twenty-seven percent of schools have negotiated salaries below the social optimum due to cross-district externalities, where high salaries at one school lead to hiring reductions, which increase labor supply in competing districts.

Marketing Yourself In The Arts Industry
2025-12-03 12:00 - 13:00
Join the Arts Division and Career Success for a fast-paced, interactive online workshop on how to market yourself in the Arts—the event will cover personal branding, transferable skills, networking, gig work and more, giving you clear action steps to stand out in Arts-related careers and beyond.
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ADMISSION
– FREE for UCSC students
– Registration required here
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This program is open to all UC Santa Cruz affiliates consistent with state and federal law.

College Night: One Planet, One Home
2025-12-03 17:00 - 20:00 | College Nine and John R. Lewis Dining Hall
College Nine and John R. Lewis College, in collaboration with UCSC Dining, present “One Planet, One Home” a conservation college night during International Education Week. Join us Wednesday, December 3 from 5–8 p.m. at the College Nine/John R. Lewis Dining Hall for a night of activities, fun, community, and a special themed menu. There will be a screening of the animated film Wall-E, an exploration of conservation efforts around the globe, and tablers offering up information. 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.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
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

College Night: Pop Music Around the World - KPop Demon Hunters
2025-12-03 17:00 - 20:00 | Rachel Carson/Oakes Dining Hall
Oakes and Rachel Carson Colleges, in collaboration with UCSC Dining, present Pop Music Around the World – KPop Demon Hunters. Join us Wednesday, December 3, from 5–8 p.m. at the Rachel Carson/Oakes Dining Hall for a night of pop music, 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.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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

Friends of Juristac UCSC Chapter Meeting
2025-12-03 17:30 - 18:30 | College 9 /John R. Lewis Community Room, College Ten Road, Santa Cruz, 95064, United States
Join the UCSC chapter of Friends of Juristac at our next meeting on Wednesday, December 3, 5:30–6:30 p.m. at the College Nine/John R. Lewis Community Room. Stand with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band in saying NO to sand and gravel mining at Juristac.
At this meeting we’ll be learning how to table to gather support for the cause and making art.
Learn more at protectjuristac.org
Location: the College Nine/John R. Lewis Community Room (map) is located behind Social Sciences 2 in the College Nine/JRL apartments community.
This event is hosted by The CoCo (College Nine & John R. Lewis College CoCurricular Programs Office).
Questions? Please email coco@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.How to Use the Statement Across Communication Channels

Learn about the Educational Therapy Certificate Program
2025-12-03 18:00 - 19:00
Transform learning.
Join Educational Therapy certificate program chair Sharmila Roy for a thoughtful program overview and hear how the uniquely designed curriculum empowers educators and professionals to make a lasting impact– in the classroom and beyond. As one of the few AET-approved programs, you’ll learn to assess learning challenges and apply effective, research-based interventions.
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.
Program organizer
This fall info session is sponsored by the Educational Therapy certificate program, a program approved by the Association of Educational Therapists.
Claim your seat- register today!

BME 280B Seminar: Gali Bai & David Haussler
2025-12-04 11:40 - 13:15 | Physical Sciences Building, Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter 1: Gali Bai, BME/PBSE Doctoral Candidate, Brooks Lab, UC Santa Cruz
Title 1: Dissecting the contribution of chromatin accessibility to RNA transcription and processing with long-read sequencing
Description: Although all cells in an organism share the same genomic sequence, transcriptional programs vary dramatically across cell types. This diversity is governed by epigenetic regulation involving the coordinated activities of chromatin remodelers, histone modifiers, and histone chaperones that precisely modulate chromatin accessibility. While previous studies have shown that chromatin accessibility at DNase I–hypersensitive sites such as promoters and enhancers is closely associated with gene expression, much less is known about how chromatin influences transcription and RNA processing. To study how chromatin regulates RNA processing, we perturbed yeast chromatin accessibility by deleting two highly conserved chromatin remodelers ISW1 and CHD1. With Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing, we profiled nascent RNA, full-length mRNA, and chromatin fibers in wild-type and chd1 isw1 double-mutant yeast cells. Loss of ISW1 and CHD1 led to increased chromatin accessibility within intragenic regions, accompanied by aberrant transcription initiation. Leveraging long-read data, we associated distinct chromatin states with specific RNA processing events and isoform expression outcomes. Despite a similar level of chromatin perturbations across the genome, genes with low baseline expression showed extensive transcriptional reprogramming, whereas highly expressed genes remained largely unaffected. These discrepancies can be partially explained by differences in the enrichment of transcription initiation motifs. In intron-containing genes, loss of ISW1 and CHD1 reduced splicing efficiency and increased intron retention, likely due to disrupted RNAPII elongation in the double mutant. Together, our findings highlight the crucial role of ATP-dependent chromatin remodelers in maintaining nucleosome organization and coordinating co-transcriptional RNA processing.
Presenter 2: David Haussler, Distinguished Professor, UC Santa Cruz
Title 2: Brain Organoids
Bio: Haussler received his PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of AAAS and AAAI. He has won a number of awards, including the 2015 Dan David Prize, the 2011 Weldon Memorial Prize from University of Oxford, the 2009 ASHG Curt Stern Award in Human Genetics, the 2008 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award from the International Society for Computational Biology, the 2005 Dickson Prize for Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and the 2003 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in Artificial Intelligence.
Hosted by: Professor Josh Stuart, BME Department

Pemulai ke Nanga Jela/Return to Nanga Jela
2025-12-04 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities 1 Building, 420 Hagar Drive, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
About the Talk: The history of hinterland communities is largely written in remote landscapes that today are often targeted for infrastructural development that forcibly relocates existing residents and transforms the land, obliterating those histories, and weakening communities.
In 1984/5 the Iban longhouse at Nanga Jela on Sarawak’s Engkari River in Malaysian Borneo, along with twenty-one other communities and a land area of 8500 ha disappeared because of the building of the Batang Ai Hydroelectric Dam and the creation of a 33 sq mile reservoir. With the drowning of these houses, lands, forests, and of multiple rivers and streams, the history of one of the longest-occupied and most historically rich Iban territories in Sarawak was gone. Many of the 3000 people who were displaced moved to government-created resettlement areas. Some left for other parts of Sarawak, and their descendants scattered around the world. All of those who were forced to leave their Batang Ai and Engkari homelands found their livelihoods completely transformed; none were free to pursue the rice agriculture and forest- and river-centered lives that they had known since their childhoods.
Three decades after this event, the ex-residents and descendants of Nanga Jela engaged in a process of reconstructing that submerged history and reconstituting an Engkari and Nanga Jela identity. Rescuing and sharing what images exist of the longhouse and its surrounding land- and waterscapes, collecting oral histories, geographical memories, genealogies, and a plethora of other local data, and employing multiple social media tools, the increasingly diverse, geographically dispersed community is regaining its history, knowledge of the lost land- and riverscapes, and its identity.
A team comprising Bobby Anak Nyegang and Itin Anak Langit, both born in Nanga Jela, and Christine Padoch, an anthropologist who spent more than two years in the longhouse, led the effort to assemble these and other materials into an image-rich bilingual (English and Iban) book that would be accessible to all in the Nanga Jela community, as well as a community-based archive. In this presentation, Padoch will discuss that complex process of writing the book, recently published as Pemulai ke NangaJela/Return to Nanga Jela and creating an archive together with the longhouse community to provide present and future descendants of the great longhouse on the Engkari River a written history of a landscape and a livelihood that has disappeared.
About the Speakers:
Christine Padoch is a Senior Curator Emerita in the Center for Plants, People and Culture of the New York Botanical Garden. From 2011 to 2017 she was the Director of Research on Forests and Human Well-Being at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). An anthropologist by training, she has spent about 50 years carrying out research on smallholder patterns of forest management, agriculture, and agroforestry in the humid tropics, principally in Southeast Asia and Amazonia. Previous to her position at CIFOR, Padoch was the Matthew Calbraith Perry Curator of Economic Botany at the NYBG. She is the author or editor of a dozen books and of approximately 100 scientific articles and book chapters. Christine Padoch has served as a scientific advisor to many international projects and has been a member of the boards of several international research institutions, including the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM), and the Earth Innovation Institute (EII). She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Nancy Lee Peluso is Professor of Environmental Social Science and Resource Policy in the College of Natural Resources and the Program Director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics, housed in the Institute of International Studies. She serves as a faculty member in the Society and Environment Division of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, where she teaches courses in Political Ecology. Her research since the 1980s has focused on Forest Politics and Agrarian Change in Southeast Asia, primarily in Indonesia. She has done field research in various parts of Indonesia—West and Central Java, East and West Kalimantan and in Sarawak, Malaysia. Her work addresses questions of property rights and access to resources, forest policy and politics, histories of land use change, and agrarian and environmental violence. She is the author or editor of three books: Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (UC Press, 1992 – still available); Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development (Oxford Press, 1996 and 2003, ed. with Christine Padoch); and Violent Environments (Cornell Press, 2001, ed. with Michael Watts.), and nearly fifty journal articles and book chapters. Professor Peluso speaks or reads four languages besides English. In 2003, she was awarded a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship and is finishing a book manuscript tentatively titled, “Ways of Seeing Borneo: Landscape, Territory, and Violence”. She is currently working on a comparative study on the formation of “political forests” in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand as well as a book examining the entanglements of violence and territoriality in landscape history in West Kalimantan.

Week 10 Wellness: Healing Support for Finals Stress
2025-12-04 12:00 - 15:00 | Mary Holmes Fireside Lounge, 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join us for a moment of pause and restoration as you prepare for finals
Hosted by the Division of Student Affairs and Success in collaboration with On the Margins

Free snacks and comfort food
Make your own self care kit
Astrological readings
Group Reiki
Massage

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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.

GradWiC Womxn's Lunch
2025-12-04 13:00 - 14:00 | CA
Join Graduate Womxn in Computing (GradWiC) for our final Womxn’s Luncheon of the quarter. We will be on the E2 Lanai patio weather allowing, or E2-599 in the case of inclement weather.

Behavioral, Econometrics and Theory Seminar Series Presents: Jacopo Magnani
2025-12-04 13:40 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Economics Behavioral, Econometrics, & Theory Seminar
Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025
Time: 1:40-3:00 p.m.
Location: E2-499

Speaker: Jacopo Magnani
Title: Associate Professor of Economics
Affiliation: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, visiting Caltech
Host: Kristian Lopez Vargas

Seminar title: Behavioral Limits to Complete Markets

ABSTRACT: Standard economic theory predicts that individuals should prefer complete markets to incomplete markets, as the former allow state-contingent claims for every possible outcome. Yet real-world markets remain incomplete, and the demand-side origins of the phenomenon are poorly understood. We develop an experimental framework to examine whether investors may themselves prefer incomplete markets, and highlight two potential mechanisms: preference instability, which exposes agents to greater regret or temptation in complete markets, and complexity costs, which arise because higher dimensionality increases cognitive effort and errors. In our experiment, participants consistently reveal a preference for in complete markets, contradicting the rational benchmark. Comparing homegrown and induced-preference treatments, we find no evidence that this behavior is driven by preference instability. Instead, utility losses, response times, and subjective ratings indicate that complexity costs drive the preference for incompleteness. Structural estimation confirms that complete markets are several times more complex than incomplete ones, providing a behavioral foundation for market incompleteness.

Future careers: What will work look like in 2030?
2025-12-04 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Join Dean PK Agarwal for this free online session. He’ll lead a forward-looking conversation on emerging job roles in tech, sustainability, health, and creative industries. Learn how industry convergence and global trends are shaping new career paths and the skills you’ll need to stay relevant.

Discover which industries are driving job creation and how roles are evolving across tech, sustainability, health, and the creative economy.
Understand the impact of global trends—like AI, climate change, and demographic shifts—on the future of work.
Identify the skills and mindsets that will help you stay competitive and adaptable in a rapidly changing landscape.

This session is part of Pathways to Professional Success, a new conversation series hosted by Dean P.K. Agarwal.

Claim your seat!

Embedded Systems Program Info Session
2025-12-04 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Build Your Career in Embedded Systems
While hiring has slowed in some tech sectors, the demand for skilled Embedded Systems professionals continues to grow across industries.
At this free winter info session, you’ll learn about emerging roles in embedded technology and the essential skills that make your resume stand out. Discover how AI is being integrated into embedded systems—and how you can stay ahead of the curve with UCSC Silicon Valley Extension’s industry-aligned courses and expert instructors.
Featured Speaker:
Michael Wang, Chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Embedded Systems Certificate Program, will share insights on the evolving job market, key technical competencies, and strategies to advance your career.
This session will also highlight two upcoming Winter courses ideal for building your foundation or deepening your expertise in Embedded Systems.
This winter info session is sponsored by the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Embedded Systems certificate program.

Register today.

Movie Night: "And the Band Played On," honoring AIDS Awareness Month
2025-12-04 19:00 - 22:00 | Cantu Queer Center, Crown Lane, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Need a break from studying for finals? Want some free pizza? Interested in learning about the history of HIV/AIDS here in the USA? Look no further! UCSC’s Global and Community Health Program, Student Health Outreach & Promotion (SHOP) and the Cantu Queer Center are partnering to screen, “And The Band Played On” by Roger Spottiswoode at the Cantu Queer Center on December 4th from 7pm-10pm.

Come relax and enjoy a brief presentation on the history of HIV/AIDS in the United States as well as some local resources that you can use if you or somebody you know is HIV positive. We will also be talking about HIV/AIDS prevention strategies. Then, we will screen “And The Band Played On” by Roger Spottiswoode to give a better look at what the public health sphere looked like during the 1980’s AIDS epidemic in America. Afterwards, we will leave some room for comments, questions, or any feelings towards the film or about the topic in general. We hope to see you there!

Barnstorm Presents: Musical Theater Showcase
2025-12-04 19:30 - 21:00 | Theater Arts B100 Studio Theater, 453 Kerr Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Step into the spotlight with Barnstorm’s musical theater showcase—an intimate, cabaret-style evening featuring standout performances by our talented students. From beloved Broadway tunes to hidden gems, this lively celebration of song and story is not to be missed. More info about Barnstorm here.
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ADMISSION
– General admission $5–$20 “Pay What You Like”
– Free for UCSC undergrads (ticket required).
– Tickets issued online HERE through Eventbrite only.
– Follow the Dept. of Performance, Play & Design on Eventbrite for notifications and updates.
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
– Ticket holders not seated at least 5 minutes before the advertised start time may forfeit their ticket/seat and no refund will be issued.
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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.

Littschwager, N. (CSE) - A Proposal for Characterizing Replicated Systems and Emulators
2025-12-05 09:00 - 11:00
Simulation is a coinductive proof technique to assert the behavioral equivalence of computing systems that has seen fruitful application in distributed systems, concurrent process calculi, and programming languages, since the 1970’s. We have also utilized simulation in our prior work, where we formalized and proved a folklore claim that the state-based and operation-based approaches to Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are ‘equivalent’ since they can ‘emulate each other’. More specifically, a CRDT system consists of a collection of nodes called replicas. Clients interact with individual replicas by querying or updating their state, and replicas interact by message passing over a network to eventually reach a convergent state. There are two main approaches to implementing a CRDT: operation-based, and state-based. We showed that the main state-based and operation-based approaches to CRDTs do indeed ‘emulate each other’ since one can exhibit a pair of weak simulations between the original type of CRDT, and its corresponding translation into the other type. We then leveraged the existence of these weak simulations to formally prove a ‘representation independence’ result, in the sense that when access to the CRDTs is mediated by an imperative programming language, the programmer cannot discern the underlying CRDT implementation by producing a program that terminates when run using one type of CRDT implementation, but not when run with the other.
Unfortunately, our results are impractical for the purpose of being reapplied to asserting the equivalence of other replicated systems, since the simulation relations (that one needs to exhibit in order to prove the necessary representation-independence) are non-modular, requiring the user to reason about the potential executions of their entire replicated system. Additionally, we observed that behavioral equivalence of state-based and operation-based CRDTs is a specific instance of the more general paradigm of ‘emulation’, which is the process by which an ‘emulator’ translates the behavior of one system into the behavior of a different system.
We propose to generalize the techniques of our prior work to be applicable for any pair of replicated systems, and correct the ‘non-modularity’ issue by decomposing the overall proof structure into compositional simulation proofs about the local behavior of a replica, and the behavior of the communication medium. Our second proposal comes from the observation that, to our knowledge, ‘emulation’ has not been given a formal and general mathematical semantic model that adequately captures the practical nuances faced by researchers and practitioners working on emulators. With that in mind, we propose a notion of a faithful emulator, inspired by the concept of a faithful functor 𝐹 ∶ C → D which lets us regard objects in C as ‘the same as’ the objects in D, but with additional structure.
Host: Nathan Littschwager, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Lindsey Kuper

DeGrendele, C. (AM) - Learning-Augmented and Structure-Preserving Methods for Conservation Law Solvers
2025-12-05 10:00 - 12:30 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
In this work, we develop numerical methods for conservation laws that explore statistical, structure-preserving, and machine-learning-based approaches, each built on top of traditional numerical solvers. First, we develop a general Gaussian-process-based “recipe’’ for constructing high-order linear operators such as interpolation, reconstruction, and derivative approximations. Building on this recipe, we derive a kernel-agnostic convergence theory for GP-based operators that interprets them as generalized finite-difference schemes, defines an effective order-of-accuracy proxy that captures non-ideal truncation-error structure, and uses this metric to select stencil geometries and kernel hyperparameters analytically. We then introduce a new second-order kernel, Discontinuous Arcsin (DAS), that is stationary and prevents oscillations. DAS is integrated into a shock-capturing framework called the Multidimensional Optimal Order Detection (MOOD) method and shows an increase in efficiency by admitting less first order cascades. Next, we address the long-standing problem of spurious pressure oscillations in compressible multi-component and real-fluid simulations by introducing a fully conservative pressure-equilibrium-preserving scheme and a high-order fully conservative approximate variant that apply to arbitrary equations of state. Unlike existing approaches, these methods avoid non-conservative updates or EOS-specific constructions, and on smooth interface advection tests with ideal-gas, stiffened-gas, and van der Waals fluids they reduce spurious pressure oscillations by orders of magnitude relative to current schemes. We then propose a hybrid numerical–machine learning framework for mixed hyperbolic–parabolic systems in which only the diffusive contribution is learned while the hyperbolic fluxes are advanced with standard shock-capturing methods, enabling timesteps at a hyperbolic CFL. Within this framework, we compare several neural architectures and loss designs on viscous Burgers tests and on the one-dimensional Euler equations with heat conduction, showing that U-shaped neural operators combined with multi-step and TVD-style regularization improve long-time stability and spectral behavior, and we analyze the resulting coupled schemes via eigenvalue-based stability diagnostics. Finally, we apply high-order, shock-capturing finite-difference methods within NASA’s Launch Ascent and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA) framework to quantify acoustic and pressure loads on the Artemis Mobile Launcher, including multiphase simulations of water-suppression systems and comparisons to flight data that inform hardware design for future missions. Collectively, this work offers a set of targeted advances in kernel-based numerical operators, conservative schemes and learning-augmented solvers each aimed at improving accuracy, stability, or efficiency in complex multiphysics flow simulation.
Event Host: Chris DeGrendele, Ph.D. Candidate, Applied Mathematics
Advisor: Dongwook Lee
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96308438100?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 123456

Fall 2025 Open Studios
2025-12-05 12:00 - 16:00 | Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Art Department students exhibit their art work throughout studios and classrooms at the Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center at UC Santa Cruz. The Open Studios event features student art work in a variety of media, including:
– Drawing
– Painting
– Print media
– Sculpture
– Photography
– Environmental art
– Electronic art/new media
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ADMISSION
FREE and open to the public.
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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.

Garg, S. (CSE) - MAPPING ANNOTATIONS FROM NETLIST TO SOURCE CODE
2025-12-05 13:00 - 14:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Hardware design flows have become increasingly complex as modern chips integrate billions
of transistors and rely on aggressive synthesis optimizations to meet performance,
area, and power targets. While these transformations improve circuit efficiency, they
also erase the correspondence between gate-level netlists and their originating HDL
source lines. The loss of traceability makes post-synthesis debugging, timing backannotation,
and root-cause analysis extremely difficult. Existing solutions depend on
tool-specific metadata or preserved signal names, which are often lost after flattening,
retiming, or logic restructuring.
To address this long-standing problem, this thesis presents SynAlign, a structural
alignment framework that restores the mapping between optimized netlists and
source code without relying on synthesis metadata. SynAlign treats both the reference
RTL and synthesized designs as graphs and iteratively aligns them using shared
structural cues—such as sequential boundaries, fan-in/fan-out relationships, and partial
naming patterns. The algorithm employs anchor-based seeding, multi-stage neighborhood
matching, and a lightweight scoring function to propagate correspondences
efficiently across large designs.
Extensive evaluation demonstrates that SynAlign achieves over 90% line-level
alignment accuracy across diverse designs, maintaining robustness even when 60% of
signal names are obfuscated or removed. The framework scales linearly with design size,
completing alignment on multi-million-node circuits within minutes. Controlled tests
confirmed structural stability under synthetic noise, while production-level validation
on real processor and accelerator modules verified industrial applicability.
By recovering structural visibility lost during synthesis, SynAlign bridges a
critical gap between front-end design intent and post-synthesis implementation. Its explainable
alignment enables faster debug cycles, more accurate timing correlation, and
provides a foundation for next-generation EDA tools that integrate traceability, optimization
transparency, and source-level introspection into the hardware development
process.
Host: Sakshi Garg, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Jose Renau
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96207792766?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 669162
