• The Trial of Spock—An Opera Workshop

    The Trial of Spock
    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    The creators of The Trial of Spock—An Opera In Three Acts present concert performances of five scenes from an opera-in-progress at the UC Santa Cruz Music Center Recital Hall.  Captain Christopher Pike is gravely injured. Lieutenant Spock is behaving strangely. Charged with protecting Pike in his state of extreme need,Vulcan Commodore T’or suspects that Lieutenant […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • “The Cigarette Surfboard” screening with filmmaker Ben Judkins (Kresge ’17)

    Join Banana Slug alumni filmmaker Ben Judkins (Kresge ’17, film and digital media) and “ciggy board” creator Taylor Lane for a screening of their award-winning documentary, The Cigarette Surfboard (presented by the California Coastal Commission’s Whale Tail Grant). 5:00-6:00 PM | alumni meet & greet with light refreshments 6:00-7:35 PM | film screening 7:35-8:30 PM | filmmaker discussion 8:30-9:00 PM | mingle REGISTER ABOUT […]

    Free
  • Hendawy, M. (CM) – Autonoming Child Online Safety in the Age of AI: From Control to Digital Co-Agency Across Cultures

    Virtual Event

    Children’s lives are now inextricably linked with AI-driven digital systems that shape learning, social interaction, and development. This has elevated child online safety to a central concern for families, policymakers, and educators. This makes Child online safety a wicked socio-technical problem, emerging from the complex interplay of social norms, platform incentives, cultural expectations, and rapidly […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data

    Presenter: Amanda Coston, Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley Description: Performance evaluation plays a central role in decisions about whether and how predictive algorithms should be deployed in high-stakes settings. Yet, in many real-world domains, evaluation is fundamentally difficult: the data available for assessment are often biased, incomplete, or noisy, and the act of deploying […]

  • Robbins, A. (ECE) – How to train your organoid: goal-directed learning in biological neural networks

    Hybrid Event

    Artificial neural networks can now learn to play games, control robots, generate language, and solve complicated reasoning tasks, yet we still lack a clear understanding of how to directly guide learning in biological neural networks. We show that brain organoids can learn to solve a fundamental control task, balancing an inverted pendulum, through closed-loop electrophysiology. […]

  • ECE 290 Seminar: Dynamical Signatures: Harnessing the Hidden Language of In-Space Electric Propulsion

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

    Presenter: Dr. Christine Greve, Research Engineer,  Edwards AFB Description: Low-thrust space electric propulsion systems offer long propulsion system lifetimes for satellite maintenance maneuvers. These thrusters operate by generating and accelerating plasmas, making the thrusters throttleable, propellant-efficient, and scalable from low-to-high power operations. This talk will focus on efforts to leverage the underlying time-dependent dynamics of […]

  • Ecology of Presence: Pathways to the Natural World

    Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    Norris Center Art + Science Graduate Fellowship Exhibition Ecology of Presence: Pathways to the Natural World brings together the work of ten graduate students supported by the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History Art + Science Fellowship, a program dedicated to creative research connecting art with the natural world. Across media – including sound, […]

    Free
  • Tax Workshops for International Students & Scholars

    Graduate Student Commons 420 Hagar Drive, Santa Cruz, CA

    International Student Services and Programming (ISSP) will be hosting two tax-related sessions for international students and scholars in the coming months, including a hands-on workshop for anyone who wants support while working through the filing process. We understand that filing taxes can be daunting, so our office is here to provide resources to make this […]

  • Wellness in Action: Managing Stress in Times of Uncertainty

    Wellness in Action

    Monday, February 23, 1:00 PM – 1:30 PM Location: Register for the Zoom link Periods of uncertainty can increase stress, reduce focus, and affect overall well-being. Participants will learn practical strategies to pause, regain perspective, and respond to stress with greater clarity. These sustainable skills build resiliency, help maintain calm, and create balance during challenging […]

  • Radical Craft’s Works-in-Progress Exhibition

    Social Sciences 1 Social Sciences 1, Santa Cruz, CA

    Join us for ANTH 196V

    Radical Craft’s
    Works-in-Progress
    Exhibition

    Monday, March 9th, 1:30-3

    Social Sciences 1, 3rd Floor

  • Harrison, D. (CS) – Multi-Level Control in Neural Dialogue Generation: Style, Semantics, and Selection through Over-Generation and Ranking

    End-to-end neural generation models have largely displaced the modular architectures that once gave dialogue system designers explicit control over what is said and how it is said. While these models produce fluent text, they collapse content planning, sentence planning, and surface realization into a single undifferentiated decoding step, sacrificing the controllable structure that earlier systems […]

  • AM Seminar: Solution Discovery in Fluids with High Precision Using Neural Networks

    Presenter: Ching-Yao Lai, Assistant Professor, Stanford University Description: I will discuss examples utilizing neural networks (NNs) to find solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) that facilitate new discoveries. Despite being deemed universal function approximators, neural networks, in practice, struggle to fit functions with sufficient accuracy for rigorous analysis. Here, we developed multi-stage neural networks (Wang […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data

    Presenter: Amanda Coston, Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley Description: Performance evaluation plays a central role in decisions about whether and how predictive algorithms should be deployed in high-stakes settings. Yet, in many real-world domains, evaluation is fundamentally difficult: the data available for assessment are often biased, incomplete, or noisy, and the act of deploying […]

  • Free Coffee, Snacks, & Conversation

    Free Coffee, Snacks, & Conversation
    Merrill College Office 641 Merrill Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Enjoy a cup of coffee, cocoa, or tea, and a breakfast snack with Merrill Provost McGuinness. Stay and chat with him and Poppy the Merrill Chihuahua, or take it go. See you outside of the Merrill College office, across from the Merrill Mailroom.

    Free
  • Mashhadi, N. (CSE) – Compositional, Clinically Conditioned, and Confound-Aware Deep Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging

    Virtual Event

    Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of dementia. Neuroimaging and clinical biomarkers can reveal early disease changes, but building reliable machine learning models is difficult because data come from different scanners and sites, some modalities are missing, labeled cohorts are limited, and factors such as age and scanner/site effects […]

  • A Musical Journey with UCSC Music Ensembles —Percussion, Celtic, Classical Guitar, Horns, Central Asian, Experimental

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Audiences are invited to the free winter quarter chamber concert at the Music Center Recital Hall at UC Santa Cruz to hear selections from multiple ensembles, including the following: UCSC Percussion Ensemble William Winant, director UCSC Celtic Chamber Music Ensemble Bill Coulter, director UCSC Classical Guitar Ensemble Christopher Mallet, director William Coulter, steel string guitar […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • Nowruz

    Merrill Cultural Center 200 McLaughlin Dr, Santa Cruz, CA

    Join AA/PIRC and the Iranian Student Union on Tuesday, March 10th from 7:30-9:30pm at the Merrill Cultural Center to celebrate Nowruz — the Iranian/Afghan New Year! Come learn about the significance of Nowruz, enjoy delicious food and activities, be together in community, and more. Register at: bit.ly/nowruz26 You Belong Here: The programs and services described here […]

  • CSE Colloquium: Co-Active AI-Assisted Programming

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

    Presenter: Nadia Polikarpova, UCSD Abstract: AI-assisted programming has rapidly moved from novelty to default. Today, most developers use AI coding tools, and increasingly rely on agentic systems capable of making multi-step design and implementation decisions with minimal human guidance. While these systems boost productivity, they also introduce new risks: developers may disengage from the reasoning behind […]

    Free