Events

UCSC Concert Choir
2026-03-13 19:30 - 21:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
UCSC Concert Choir performs in a winter quarter concert, “Contrast,” with music by Chris Pratorius, Einojuhanni Rautavarra, and Juhi Bansal. Featured is “Contraponientes,” by Pratorius, a 30-minute piece for choir, three flutes, harp, and cello. a song cycle for choir on texts by Federico Garcia Llorca. “The Rautavaara” also features Llorca texts, while the Bansal reflects some of the pastoral imagery of the Llorca texts. Ensemble directed by Nathaniel Berman with guest conductor Lukáš Janata.
—
ADMISSION
– General admission.
– Free for UCSC students (ticket required).
– Tickets available here online through Eventbrite only.
– Follow the Music Dept on Eventbrite for notices 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.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 cash/credit via the on-site parking attendant
– 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Barnstorm Presents—Musical Theater Cabaret
2026-03-13 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. Directed by Ella Freed.
—
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.
—
ADVISORIES
– Ticket holders not seated at least 10 minutes before the advertised start time may forfeit their ticket/seat and no refund will be issued.
—
FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Fri. March 13: 7:30 p.m.
Sat. March 14: 2:00 p.m.
Sun. March 15: 2:00 p.m.
—
ADMISSION
– Tickets issued through Eventbrite; Follow the Dept. of Performance, Play & Design and Barnstorm 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.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 cash/credit via the on-site parking attendant
– 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Questions that Matter - How to Live Long and Prosper: Lessons from a Star Trek Opera
2026-03-13 19:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St, Santa Cruz, 95060, United States
What do we need to live a fulfilling life? This essential question of the humanities feels especially pressing now, on the precipice of profound changes to our planet, our bodies, and our sense of human exceptionality. Join us for a conversation — and a music-and-drama masterclass — about speculative fiction from the Star Trek world, the myth of Orpheus, and what the operatic form can teach us about intelligence, humanity, and the good life. The evening will feature UC Santa Cruz faculty, Ben Leeds Carson (Professor of Music), Camilla A. Hawthorne (Associate Professor of Sociology), and Pranav Anand (THI Faculty Director and Professor of Linguistics), along with librettist Perre DiCarlo.

This event follows the “The Trial of Spock — An Opera Workshop” on March 8th. The opera creators will present five scenes from an opera-in-progress by Ben Leeds Carson, Perre DiCarlo, and Lincoln and Lee Taiz. With co-authors John DeLancey, Camilla Hawthorne, and Michael Chemers.
Questions That Matter is a public humanities series developed by The Humanities Institute and the community of Santa Cruz. It brings together, in conversation, two or more UC Santa Cruz scholars with community residents and students to explore questions that matter to all of us.

Wang, H. (CSE) - Accelerating RTL Simulation with Specialized Graph Partitioners
2026-03-13 14:00 - 15:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Register transfer level (RTL) simulation is an invaluable tool for developing, debugging, verifying, and validating hardware designs. However, the performance of RTL simulation has long been a limiting factor in industry. Despite the inherent parallelism of hardware, current RTL simulators have not achieved practical performance gains due to fundamental challenges in communication, synchronization, memory bandwidth, and architectural mapping.
This dissertation addresses the RTL simulation performance problem from three complementary perspectives: optimizing simulation latency through parallelism, improving aggregate throughput via deduplication, and enabling efficient GPU acceleration with RTL-native semantics.
First, we present RepCut, a parallel RTL simulation methodology that uses replication-aided partitioning to cut circuits into balanced partitions with minimal overlaps. By replicating the overlaps, RepCut eliminates problematic data dependences between partitions and significantly reduces synchronization overhead. RepCut achieves superlinear speedups of up to 27.10x using 24 threads with only a 3.81% replication cost.
Second, we introduce Simulation Deduplication, a technique that exploits the extensive reuse of building blocks in modern hardware designs. By generating shared code for duplicated instances and carefully co-scheduling their execution, we reduce the instruction cache footprint and memory bandwidth pressure. This approach achieves up to 1.95x speedup for single simulations and 2.09x improvement in overall batch simulation throughput.
Third, we present Toucan, a GPU-accelerated RTL simulation framework that preserves RTL semantics rather than flattening designs to gate-level netlists. By leveraging native GPU arithmetic operations and introducing warp-level micro-partitioning with shuffle-based communication, Toucan achieves efficient mapping of irregular circuit topologies to GPU SIMT architectures while maintaining fast compilation times. Toucan achieves up to 4.73x speedup over the state-of-the-art GPU RTL simulator on large multi-core designs.
Together, these three approaches provide a comprehensive solution to RTL simulation performance optimization, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art commercial and open-source simulators across multiple hardware platforms and design scales.
Event Host: Haoyuan Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Jose Renau
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94044618343?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 574772

Winter 2026 Open Studios
2026-03-13 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
—
ADMISSION
FREE and open to the public.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 cash/credit via the on-site parking attendant
– 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Get Certified in CPR, First Aid, and AED!
2026-03-13 11:00 - 13:00 | Scotts Valley Center
Location: Scotts Valley Center
Register for the training.
This Adult and Pediatric First Aid/CPR/AED blended learning course equips you to recognize and care for various first aid breathing and cardiac emergencies involving adults, children, and infants. It is designed for individuals who need a certification that satisfies OSHA workplace or other regulatory requirements.
This class is taught in a blended learning format and the online portion must be completed before attending the Instructor-led skills session. A valid 2-year digital certificate for Adult and Pediatric First Aid/CPR/AED is issued upon completion.
This training will be held on-site at the Scotts Valley Center. To register, please fill out the registration link.
For more information, please visit the Occupational Health Training website.
For questions or to schedule a training for your team, please contact Occupational Health Specialist, Elizabeth Tomlinson, at ektomlin@ucsc.edu.

Moghadam, M. (CE) - Constraint-Aware Scene Understanding and Trajectory Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Vehicles
2026-03-13 10:00 - 12:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are commonly organized as modular pipelines that transform raw sensor measurements into low-level actuation commands through perception, planning, and control. While learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in perception and environment modeling, the planning layer remains a key bottleneck for reliable autonomy. Highway driving in particular requires long-horizon reasoning and socially aware interaction with multiple actors, while also producing smooth and dynamically feasible motion that can be tracked by classical controllers.
This thesis focuses on scene understanding and planning for highway driving. We study the problem through two complementary simulation environments: the high-fidelity CARLA simulator for motion planning and continuous trajectory generation under realistic vehicle dynamics and road geometry, and the lightweight HighwayEnv simulator for interaction-rich behavior planning at high episode throughput.
We present three planning contributions that increase autonomy. First, we introduce a modular hierarchical planning framework in Frenet space that combines long-term decision-making with short-term trajectory optimization. The approach includes a corridor-based dynamic obstacle avoidance strategy that generates spatiotemporal polynomial trajectories and supports diverse driving styles through interpretable parameter tuning. Second, we propose an end-to-end continuous deep reinforcement learning approach that unifies decision-making and motion planning into a single policy that outputs continuous polynomial trajectories in the Frenet frame. A spatiotemporal observation tensor and a temporal convolutional backbone enable the learned planner to exploit interaction history and outperform optimization-based and discrete RL baselines in CARLA. Third, we develop an interaction-aware behavior planning neural network architecture that couples trajectory prediction with high-level decision-making via a social pooling scene encoder built on actor histories and an ego-centered BEV representation. This unified design improves RL social awareness, safety, and overall driving performance in multi-agent highway scenarios in HighwayEnv.
Across extensive simulation studies, the results show that constraint-aware representations and learning-based policies can improve planning quality beyond hand-crafted objectives, especially when the policy is equipped with spatiotemporal social context while retaining classical feedback control for stable trajectory tracking. Finally, we provide supporting simulation and evaluation infrastructure, including observation tensor and neural network designs, BEV utilities, and scalable training and testing pipelines, to enable reproducible research on learning-based planning in interactive traffic.
Event Host: Majid Moghadam, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Engineering
Advisor: Gabriel Elkaim
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95848602314?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 325939

Fan, Y. (CSE) - Building Human-Centered Multimodal AI Agents
2026-03-13 09:30 - 11:00
As multimodal artificial intelligence systems become increasingly embedded in everyday technology, there is a growing need to design human-centered AI agents that support and amplify human capabilities rather than replace them. This dissertation investigates how to build human-centered multimodal AI agents, framing human-centeredness as an agent-level objective that requires both accessible, assistive interaction and reliable, trustworthy behavior across physical and digital environments. This dissertation explores two complementary dimensions of human-centered agent design. The first focuses on enhancing accessibility through conversational and interactive agents that assist users in everyday tasks. We study both embodied and digital settings in which agents reduce physical and cognitive burdens via natural language interaction, including hands-free drone control, navigation assistance in unfamiliar environments, and interactive access to complex graphical user interfaces. The second dimension focuses on strengthening agent capability to improve reliability and trust. We investigate how agents can acquire environment-specific knowledge through autonomous exploration and how they can reason about visual information in a grounded and transparent manner, drawing inspiration from human learning and reasoning behaviors.
Event Host: Yue Fan, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Xin Eric Wang
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99619642071?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 467959

UCSC Jazz Combos
2026-03-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the UC Santa Cruz Jazz Combos for a winter concert. Directed by Charles Hamilton.
—
ADMISSION
– General admission
– Free for UCSC students (ticket required).
– Tickets available here online through Eventbrite only.
– Follow the Music Dept on Eventbrite for notices 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.
—
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)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Your path to medical school starts here.
2026-03-12 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Are you considering medical school and seeking a clear, supportive path forward?
Join the University of California, Santa Cruz, for a free online informational session to learn more about our Summer 2026 Premed Postbacc Cohort Programs. This session is designed for students and graduates who are serious about pursuing a career in health care and want expert guidance through the medical school preparation and application process.
During this session, you’ll learn how the UCSC Premed Postbacc Program provides a structured, cohort-based experience—offered in Silicon Valley and Marina on the Central Coast—to help students strengthen their academic foundation, prepare for medical school, and apply with confidence.
Claim your seat.

[HSI Equity Talk] Beyond Invisibility: Reimagining Servingness to Support Undocumented Transfer Students
2026-03-12 15:30 - 17:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/hsi-equity-talk-beyond-invisibility-reimagining-servingness-to-support-undocumented-transfer-students/
Presenters: Valeria Alonso Blanco, Dr. Saskias Casanova, and Jesus Morales
This interactive talk draws on a qualitative study conducted with undocumented Latinx transfer students at a California four-year HSI. Using focus groups and reflexive thematic analysis, we examined how these students perceive and experience institutional support, belonging, and barriers related to their intersectional identities. This session is designed around three goals: (1) assessing what staff and administrators currently know about undocumented students on campus, particularly undocumented transfer students; (2) building shared knowledge through our research findings and student voices; and (3) connecting participants to existing campus resources and identifying concrete opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration. We will share key resources and actionable strategies for holistically serving undocumented transfer students.
Please register online. The Zoom information and a calendar invitation will be sent to those who RSVP.
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.

BME 280B Seminar: Modulating Insulin Receptor Through New Ligands
2026-03-12 11:40 - 13:15 | Physical Sciences Building, Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Danny Chou, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Stanford University
Description: Since its discovery in 1921, insulin has been at the forefront of scientific breakthroughs. From its amino acid sequencing to the revelation of its three‐dimensional structure, the progress in insulin research has spurred significant therapeutic breakthroughs. In recent years, protein engineering has introduced innovative chemical and enzymatic methods for insulin modification, fostering the development of therapeutics with tailored pharmacological profiles. In this seminar, I will highlight the use of new ligands to modulate insulin receptors and discuss how they continue to shape the future trajectory of insulin research.
Bio: Danny Chou is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and by courtesy, of Chemical & Systems Biology at Stanford University. He is an affinity group leader at Stanford Diabetes Research Center. His research interests lie in the intersection of peptide therapeutics and metabolic diseases. He started his independent career as an assistant professor of biochemistry at University of Utah in 2014. He moved his lab to Stanford University in 2020 and continued their pursuit of using peptide and protein chemistry to develop therapeutics to address unmet needs.
Hosted by: Professor Andy Yeh, BME Department

HCI Build Demo Day
2026-03-12 11:00 - 15:30 | Event Hall, 3175 Bowers Ave, Santa Clara, 95054, United States
Welcome to HCI Build Demo Day!
Get ready to dive into an exciting in-person event where HCI builders come together to showcase their projects. In Intro to Build at UCSC Silicon Valley Campus, we build with two realms of technologies – digital and physical. HCI 202A will showcase their creative apps they made with React Native and HCI 202B will have an exhibition of the interactive physical prototypes they made with Arduino.
Light refreshments are provided at the event, and it is free for all to attend!

Agenda
11:00 AM – 1:15 PM

Mobile Programming Demo

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Physical Computing Demo

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode II
2026-03-11 19:00 - 23:59 | CA
Shakespeare returns to the characters and themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in what may have been the last play he had a hand in writing: The Two Noble Kinsmen. This time, however, the story of Theseus and Hippolyta, the disorienting experience of adolescent sexual desire, and the conflict of duties to sovereigns, parents, friends, and spouses are no laughing matter. It’s over-shadowed by the play’s source text — Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, in which chance foils Theseus’s best efforts to create order out of chaos and meaning out of loss — and by Shakespeare’s own experience writing tragedy and tragicomedy.

Thomas Luxon is Professor of English, Emeritus at Dartmouth College, where he was also the inaugural Cheheyl Professor and Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. His teaching and scholarship focus on literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation, with a particular interest in John Milton, John Bunyan, John Dryden, and 17th-century English religion and politics. In his revelatory book, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship (Duquesne UP, 2005), Professor Luxon explores the impact of ancient theories of friendship on Milton’s conception of Reformation marriage, and during the pandemic, he contributed a lecture about the rivalry of friendship and marriage in Two Noble Kinsmen to Ian Doescher’s Shakespeare 2020 Project.
Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of works by Shakespeare that are rarely produced.

What's new in AI?
2026-03-11 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Chat with the AI chair
Lead innovation as a machine learning engineer
Want to learn what’s new in AI? Join Praveen Krishna, chair of the Artificial Intelligence Application Development certificate program, in an informal discussion about the AI topic of the month and an open Q&A. You’ll get an insider’s look at what you need to know for where you want to go. Bring your questions. Share your experience. Plan your learning.
Every 2nd Wednesday | Online
Visit our program page for a closer look at our AI App Development courses and offerings.
Register now.

College Night: Made By Human Hands
2026-03-11 17:00 - 20:00 | Rachel Carson/Oakes Dining Hall
Oakes and Rachel Carson Colleges, in collaboration with UCSC Dining, present Made By Human Hands. Join us Wednesday, March 11, from 5–8 p.m. at the Rachel Carson/Oakes Dining Hall for a night of 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

Global Cafe (Winter 2026)
2026-03-11 14:00 - 16:00 | Classroom Unit, Classroom Unit, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, Select a Country:
International Student Services & Programming invites you to our monthly Global Cafe, a space for all international-minded community members to connect. Swing by for some refreshments and an opportunity to meet other international students and scholars, as well as Global Engagement staff. Feel free to drop in at any time and stay for as long as you’d like.
Our winter Global Cafe dates:

Wednesday, January 14
Wednesday, February 11
Wednesday, March 11

Research Lunch & Learn: PI Eligibility and the Exception to Policy (ETP) Process
2026-03-11 12:00 - 13:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/research-lunch-learn-pi-eligibility-and-the-exception-to-policy-etp-process/
Join us on March 11, 2026, 12-1 p.m. for a session led by Deirdre Beach, Executive Director of the Office of Sponsored Projects, and others as they discuss and review UCSC’s policy on Principal Investigator (PI) eligibility. This session will highlight which appointments are eligible to request an exception, when PIship is necessary to support the work, and the process for submitting an exception request for consideration.
Join: Zoom link for this session.

Yang, S. (CSE) - Beyond Image Editing: Building Generalized Image Customization Systems
2026-03-11 11:00 - 13:00
Current generative vision models struggle with image customization that requires multi-step reasoning or real-world knowledge. This proposal introduces generalized image customization, enabling systems to execute complex, inferential modifications rather than just simple edits. The research focuses on the foundational framework required for this generalization, specifically high-quality training data, scalable evaluation benchmarks, self-improving training paradigms that reduce reliance on paired annotations, and unified multi-modal architectures. Building on two completed studies in data quality and evaluation, this proposal outlines two future research directions to develop capable, annotation-efficient, and reasoning-native image customization systems.
Event Host: Siwei Yang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Cihang Xie
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/3852138080?pwd=[REDACTED]

CSE Colloquium: Co-Active AI-Assisted Programming
2026-03-11 11:00 - 12:15 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 generated code, leading to shallow understanding, loss of ownership, and what is increasingly described as cognitive debt.
In this talk, I argue that AI-driven software development must be co-active: humans and AI should remain continuously engaged in a shared process of understanding and decision-making. I will present two complementary research directions toward this goal. The first focuses on observability—helping developers understand, validate, and trace the behavior of AI-generated code. The second focuses on controllability—making AI decisions explicit, persistent, and steerable. Together, these ideas restore programmer agency while maintaining the productivity gains of AI-assisted development.
Bio:
Nadia Polikarpova is an associate professor at UC San Diego, and a member of the Programming Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014, and then spent some time as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Nadia’s research interests are at the intersection of programming languages, AI, human-computer interaction, and social computing.
Hosted by: Professor Nikos Tziavelis
Location: Engineering 2, Room E2-180 (*Refreshments such as coffee, tea, pastries, and fresh fruit will be available.)
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

Nowruz
2026-03-10 19:30 - 21:30 | Merrill Cultural Center, 200 McLaughlin Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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 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.

A Musical Journey with UCSC Music Ensembles —Percussion, Celtic, Classical Guitar, Horns, Central Asian, Experimental
2026-03-10 19:00 - 21:00 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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
Caila Bigelman, violin soloist
UCSC Horn Ensemble
Susan Vollmer, director
UCSC Central Asian Ensemble
Tanya Merchant, director
UCSC Experimental Music Ensemble
Amy Beal, director
Ricky Lomelí, special guest/drum set
—
ADMISSION
– Free and open to the public.
– Open seating (no ticket required).
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 cash/credit via the on-site parking attendant
– 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
—
image: UCSC Central Asian Ensemble in Washington, D.C., where they performed and liaised with the Embassy of Uzbekistan.
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Mashhadi, N. (CSE) - Compositional, Clinically Conditioned, and Confound-Aware Deep Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging
2026-03-10 16:30 - 17:30
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 can bias results.
This dissertation develops machine learning methods for robust, interpretable, and controllable analysis of AD-related neuroimaging data. First, I introduce a modular, graph-based framework for multimodal AD detection that treats datasets and models as nodes and directed edges that can be combined to build more complex predictors. Second, I propose a clinically conditioned 3D VAE-GAN to synthesize brain MRI, enhanced with diffusion-driven sampling in clinical feature space to improve realism and control, supporting data augmentation. Third, I present a disentangled 3D masked autoencoder (MAE) that learns separated representations for age, pathology, and scanner effects, making it possible to isolate and adjust age, pathology, or scanner effects, while remaining reliable across sites.
Together, these contributions advance practical methods for modular prediction, controllable image generation, and confound-aware representation learning in neuroimaging, with an emphasis on generalization and interpretability for clinically relevant applications.
Event Host: Najmeh Mashhadi, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Razvan Marinescu
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98195204428?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 688069

Digital Accessibility: Document Accessibility with Grackle
2026-03-10 12:00 - 13:00 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/bpqXOZJRSDaaRmT6KRK8xg
Learn how to use a new Google document accessibility checker tool: Grackle.
Grackle is a Google Workspace add-on that can be used to check the accessibility of Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets.
Topics will include: how to access Grackle, how to run a report, and how to read your accessibility report to take action.

Free Coffee, Snacks, & Conversation
2026-03-10 09:00 - 11:00 | Merrill College Office, 641 Merrill Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
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.

Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data
2026-03-09 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
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 a model can itself alter which outcomes are observed. As a result, standard evaluation practices may substantially misrepresent both overall model performance and disparities across groups. In this talk, we examine several common threats to valid evaluation—including measurement error, selection bias, and distribution shift—and present principled evaluation methods that enable valid performance assessment under these challenges when appropriate conditions are met.
Bio: From UC Berkeley website: Amanda Coston is an assistant professor of statistics at UC Berkeley. Her research addresses real-world data problems that challenge the validity, reliability, and equity of algorithmic decision support systems and data-driven policy-making. Her work draws on techniques from causal inference, machine learning, and nonparametric statistics. She earned her PhD in machine learning and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently completed a postdoc at Microsoft Research on the Machine Learning and Statistics Team. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Princeton in computer science and a certificate in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Hosted by: Statistics Department

AM Seminar: Solution Discovery in Fluids with High Precision Using Neural Networks
2026-03-09 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
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 and Lai, J. Comput. Phys. 2024) that can reduce the prediction error to nearly the machine precision of double-precision floating points within a finite number of iterations. We use accurate NNs to tackle the challenge of searching for singularities in fluid equations (Wang-Lai-Gómez-Serrano-Buckmaster, Phys. Rev. Lett. 2023). Unstable singularities, especially in dimensions greater than one, are exceptionally elusive. With NNs we demonstrate the first discovery of smooth unstable self-similar singularities to unforced incompressible fluid equations (Wang et al., arXiv:2509.14185). The example illustrates how deep learning can be used to discover new and highly accurate numerical solutions to PDEs.
Bio: Ching-Yao Lai (Yao) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geophysics and an Affiliated Faculty of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, she was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. She received an undergraduate degree (2013) in Physics from National Taiwan University and a PhD (2018) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. She completed her postdoctoral research at Columbia University where she received the Lamont Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her current research focuses on enhancing the representation of machine-learning models to tackle multiscale problems. She was the recipient of the 2023 Google Research Scholar Award, the 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship, and the 2025 NSF CAREER Award.
Hosted by: Applied Mathematics

Harrison, D. (CS) - Multi-Level Control in Neural Dialogue Generation: Style, Semantics, and Selection through Over-Generation and Ranking
2026-03-09 14:00 - 16:00 | CA
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 provided. This dissertation investigates how that structure can be recovered through the over-generate-and-rank (OGR) paradigm: generating multiple candidate outputs and selecting among them using learned or prompt-based ranking functions that jointly optimize semantic fidelity, stylistic appropriateness, and conversational coherence. We instantiate OGR at three levels of natural language generation for dialogue: utterance-level stylistic control, cross-domain semantic evaluation, and dialogue-level response selection.
First, we show that explicit conditioning mechanisms, specifically decoder-level side constraints for personality variation and discourse contrast, re-introduce stylistic control into neural sequence-to-sequence models without compromising semantic accuracy. Second, we demonstrate that prompt-based learning with structured linguistic profiles achieves near-perfect personality accuracy and effectively zero slot error rate when combined with ranking, establishing that LLM prompting with explicit pragmatic specifications can match or exceed fine-tuning for personality-conditioned generation. Third, we develop a cross-domain semantic error rate evaluation framework that frames slot error computation as an extraction task, using a LoRA-adapted language model to extract meaning representations from generated text and a trained ranker to select among candidate extractions, achieving reliable evaluation across 23 topic domains without domain-specific rules. Fourth, we build and evaluate a speaker-aware transformer response ranker for Athena, our Alexa Prize socialbot, demonstrating that learned ranking over heterogeneous generator pools produces significantly longer conversations and higher user ratings than heuristic rule-based selection in a live A/B study with over 6,000 conversations.
A unifying finding emerges across all four contributions: the pragmatic features that control personality style in generation—acknowledgements, engagement questions, hedges, exclamations—are the same features that distinguish high-quality from mediocre responses in open-domain dialogue. This parallel reveals that stylistic control and response ranking are complementary mechanisms for achieving the same goal: making dialogue systems sound more natural and engaging. Together, these results support the dissertation’s central hypothesis that over-generate-and-rank provides a general, extensible mechanism for controllable neural language generation, restoring explicit decision points where competing communicative objectives can be weighed. The ranking function serves a role analogous to the sentence planner in classical NLG architectures, but operates on the outputs of modern neural and LLM-based generators.

Event Host: Davan Harrison, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
Advisor: Marilyn Walker

Radical Craft’s Works-in-Progress Exhibition
2026-03-09 13:30 - 15:00 | Social Sciences 1, Social Sciences 1, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064

Wellness in Action: Managing Stress in Times of Uncertainty
2026-03-09 13:00 - 13:30 | CA
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 times.
The Wellness in Action series is designed to help you improve your health in a short session with simple tips you can try in your own life. In the follow-up session on Monday, March 9 from 1:00 PM – 1:30 PM, you will have the opportunity to share your experience and learn from others in the group.
Register for the Zoom link. The workshop will be recorded, and a link to the recording will be sent out after the first session. The follow up session will not be recorded.
To learn more about our events and workshops, visit the Upcoming Wellness Events page.
For questions, please contact Health and Well-being Specialist, Ashley Parker, at aseparke@ucsc.edu.
