Events

Move More at Work: Promoting Health and Longevity in the Office
2025-07-10 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Thursday, July 10, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
If you spend your days at a desk, chances are you are aware of common issues like tech neck, eye strain, and carpal tunnel syndrome. Long hours at a desk can take a toll on your body — but small changes can make a big difference. This workshop is all about helping you feel better during your workday. We’ll explore how to ease muscle tension, boost your energy, and stay more focused with easy, equipment-free routines you can do right at your desk, even in work clothes. If you're looking to move more, sit less, and feel more comfortable throughout your day, this session offers a low-stress way to start building healthy habits right where you are.
To register, please fill out the registration link. This presentation will be recorded and made available after the meeting.
For more information about upcoming workshops and events, please visit the Wellness Event Calendar.
For questions, please contact Health and Well-being Specialist, Ashley Parker, at aseparke@ucsc.edu.

Job Search Strategies for New Grads
2025-07-10 14:00
So you've graduated and now it's time to look for a job, we can help!
Whether you're just starting your search or looking to improve your strategy, this workshop will walk you through how to:

Craft resumes and cover letters that reflect your skills and potential
Use LinkedIn to uncover opportunities and potential mentors
Develop networking skills

You’ll come away with actionable strategies to streamline your application process and make your next move count.
Register here: https://ucsc.joinhandshake.com/stu/events/1757697

July Slugs and Steins with Campus Architect Emeritus Frank Zwart (Cowell, ’71)
2025-07-14 18:30
The Imagining and Making of a University Campus at Santa Cruz
Every alum has a story about how he or she first discovered and came to UC Santa Cruz. But the story of how the University of California came to Santa Cruz is a longer and much more involved one. Step into the Wayback Machine with UCSC’s Campus Architect Emeritus Frank Zwart (Cowell ’71) to hear the details of how the University’s Regents selected Santa Cruz as the site for their bold new experiment in public higher education, and learn about the University's first steps in building its new home. Along the way you’ll pick up some interesting UCSC architectural history trivia and some hidden jewels from the campus archives.
Frank Zwart, FAIA, FAUA, served as campus architect at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1988 until his retirement in 2010. Under his direction, the campus nearly doubled in size, adding nearly 2.4 million square feet of building space and renovating one million more, while preserving its breathtaking site. A Pasadena, California, native, Frank received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from UC Santa Cruz (Cowell College) in 1971 and his master’s in architecture from Princeton University. Prior to joining the design and construction staff at UCSC in 1985, he worked in architectural firms in Princeton, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Aptos, Philadelphia, and Carmel.

Rainbow Slugs Staff Virtual Lunch Get-together
2025-07-16 12:00
Hello! Please join us for a virtual lunch time hang-out so that folks can gather, decompress, and be in community. We encourage folks to eat their lunch while we meet, but you can do whatever is most comfortable to you! Any level of participation is welcome. Hope to see you there! 🙂
Rainbow Slugs is UCSC's LGBTQIA2S+ Staff Affinity group. Anyone is welcome.

Ecosystem of Care Webinar: Dining Services
2025-07-16 18:00
The DSAS Ecosystem of Care webinar series continues with a spotlight on Dining Services—your guide to how students dine on campus at UC Santa Cruz. Designed for families, this session will feature campus dining leaders sharing details about meal plans, dining hall hours and locations, menu variety, dietary accommodations, and tips for helping students make the most of their on-campus dining experience.
The webinar will begin with a short presentation, followed by a Q&A based on questions submitted through the registration form.
Join us to learn how UCSC Dining supports your student’s day-to-day life and discover helpful information to stay connected to their college journey.
Registration: In advance, via Zoom

Workplace Mental Health Training for Supervisors and Managers
2025-07-17 12:00
The Office of Risk Services has partnered with OHSU’s Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Services to provide mental health support training to UCSC supervisors and managers.
This evidence based program teaches leaders:

To identify employee mental health struggles
Appropriate ways to respond to employee warning signs
Practical strategies to reduce employee stress

Employees whose managers and supervisors were trained in this program report:

Reduced anger and loneliness
Improved feelings of support from manager
Increased feelings of team cohesion

This training is open to all supervisors and managers at UCSC. Our next training session will take place on Tuesday, October 14, and will comprise the following:

A self paced online training session
A live, virtual one hour session
A two-week voluntary virtual check in

If you would like to participate in this training on Tuesday, October 14,12:00 PM – 2:30 PM please fill out this form. Please note that space is limited. Folks added to the waitlist will be given priority for our next training session.

To learn more, please visit the Workplace Mental Health Training for Supervisors and Managers website.
If you have any questions about this training, please reach out to Jessica Bulleri, Campus Health and Well-being Manager, at jbulleri@ucsc.edu.

Frosh, Friends, and Family: Welcome to the Sciences
2025-07-17 17:00
This webinar welcomes incoming science students and families to the Sciences. Meet the Science Excellence team and learn about key summer events, advising support, and resources to prepare for a strong start. We’ll also discuss science majors and how families can support students during the transition. Register here to receive a Zoom link!

Rooted in Nature Camping Trip
2025-07-19 08:00
Rooted in Nature is a pre-conference camping retreat leading up to the California Black Farmers Conference designed to connect attendees and community members with the land, with each other, and with themselves. Through guided outdoor experiences, storytelling, community meals, wellness activities, and field day activities, participants will explore healing, resilience, and joy in nature.
This is more than a camping trip—it's a space to build community, restore balance, and deepen our relationship to land and legacy. Whether you're an experienced camper or new to the outdoors, all are welcome and encouraged to attend.
Activities include:

Nature hikes & plant walks

Campfire storytelling

Art, music, & meditation circles

Workshops & land-based teachings

Group meals & reflection time

Dates: July 19-20, 2025
Location: Sunset State Beach, 201 Sunset Beach Rd, Watsonville, CA 95076
Spots are limited — Registration is required. Visit CBFCs registration page to reserve your tickets. Follow us on Instagram @cablackfarmersconference & @squareonefoundationinc for updates, packing tips, and what to expect.
This program is hosted by the Square One Foundation and proudly funded by the CA State Parks Santa Cruz Community Grant Program.
Let’s return to our roots and grow something powerful—together.

CASPA 2025 Summer Symposium
2025-07-19 13:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Building AI-Native Data Centers
The Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association invites you to join its annual all-day Summer Symposium where speakers will focus on Building AI-Native Data Centers: Innovations from Silicon to Software.
Panelists will explore advancements across the entire technology stack that are transforming the architecture and capabilities of next-generation data centers. As AI workloads scale in complexity and volume, infrastructure must evolve through tightly integrated innovation in compute, memory, storage, networking, power efficiency, cooling, orchestration, and security.
Leading innovators across the technology stack—from silicon to software—will share their insights on designing scalable, high-performance, energy-efficient, and trustworthy platforms that serve the demands of AI-native computing. The symposium will highlight how collaborative progress across silicon, systems, and software is reshaping the backbone of digital intelligence.
REGISTRATION
This event is open to all UCSC students and community members.
SPONSORSHIP
This CASPA event is co-sponsored by the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering, and AI programs.

45th Annual Dickens Universe featuring 'The Old Curiosity Shop'
2025-07-20 00:00 | Colleges Nine and John R. Lewis College Multi-purpose Room, 615 College Nine Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens.
In 2025, the Dickens Universe will feature The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. Most people remember the novel for its famous and climactic death scene, featuring one of Dickens's most beloved (and reviled) girl heroines, Little Nell. It is a novel full of interesting scenes, themes, and curiosities. Featuring a gallery of Dickens's most grotesque characters, it explores the idea of deformity, especially as it contrasts with the angelic innocence and strangely embodied beauty of Little Nell. Its picaresque roots make it an adventure story as well as an allegory of moral journey; its interest in the urban landscape, its pleasure, and its dangers suggest Dickens's social concerns.
Now in its 45th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and a summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, and anyone who loves reading and enjoys long Victorian novels.
Here are some things that make the Universe such a memorable experience.

The college lifestyle: participants live on campus, eat together in the student dining hall, and have time to meet and come to know each other in different ways.
Everyone is reading the same book. We all have this one important thing in common.
The activities include formal lectures, small discussion groups, films, daily Victorian teas, performances, and Victorian dancing.

The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe, we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.

Astronomy on Tap!
2025-07-21 19:30 | Abbott Square
Abbott Square Market. 118 Cooper St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Monday July 21, 7:30 pm
No Bad Questions: Exoplanets Edition
Ask our panelists your wildest questions!
Free and open to people of all ages!

ALEKS Math Placement for Science and Math Majors
2025-07-22 12:00
Get introduced to ALEKS PPL, an essential online platform for assessing and strengthening your math skills. In this brief session, you’ll learn how ALEKS functions as both a placement assessment and a personalized learning tool. Discover how it can support your academic success in first-year science coursework like chemistry and calculus. For a Zoom link, please register here.

Basu, S. (CSE) - Decomposition Techniques for Web-Scale Networks: Bridging Theory and Practice
2025-07-25 11:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Decompositions of large-scale networks are central to many applications in graph mining, network science, and algorithm design. Over several decades, a rich body of work has developed techniques to partition networks with various different objectives. However, a noticeable gap persists between methods with strong theoretical guarantees, and those that perform well in practice. Practical algorithms often lack provable guarantees, while theoretically sound methods are rarely straightforward to implement, and scale poorly. This thesis presents a suite of techniques that aim to close this gap, presenting decomposition methods that are both theoretically grounded and practically efficient.

The first part of the thesis focuses on dense subgraph decomposition, a fundamental problem with numerous real-world applications and a close relation to the problem of community detection studied in the complex networks literature. Specifically, we focus on decompositions that produce a large number of small components; a variant that existing techniques struggle with. We propose a novel shift in perspective: rather than approximate the optimum closely using traditional optimization approaches, we develop fast algorithms with provable lower bounds on output quality. We introduce some new objectives and metrics to achieve these, and introduce a new theoretical framework that captures structural properties of real-world networks. We compare our perspective with the common approach taken in the community detection literature, and demonstrate algorithms that significantly outperform prior methods across a broad range of datasets.
The second part of the thesis explores how network decompositions can enable sublinear-time algorithms: ones that produce approximate solutions without needing to inspect the entire input. We study two somewhat distinct problems. The first is a property testing problem in bounded-degree planar graphs, where we show that hyperfinite decompositions allow for efficient testing of even the most complex properties. The second examines shortest-path computation in real-world networks. By observing that shortest paths often traverse a dense core, we design the first sublinear algorithm that exploits this structure to approximate shortest paths. Our method competes with exact algorithms in speed, while scaling to larger networks that such algorithms cannot handle.
We leave some open problems and discuss ongoing and future work, and provide pointers on how our insights can be leveraged to study a larger class of problems in graph algorithms.
Event Host: Sabyasachi Basu, PhD Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: C. Seshadhri

The Curiosity Gala
2025-07-25 18:30
Join us for The Curiosity Gala on July 25, 2025, as we celebrate the 45th Annual Dickens Universe Conference!
Now open to the public, this enchanting evening invites community members to don their finest Victorian attire and enjoy a night of lively entertainment—including Victorian dance lessons, casino tables, a raffle, postprandial potations, and a live auction!
Hosted by the Dickens Project, the Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, with this year’s novel being Charels Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop.
The week-long conference culminates in The Curiosity Gala—a festive celebration that brings together conference attendees and community members. Purchases from the evening’s activities will support the Dickens Project’s educational programs.
Tickets are $50 benefiting the Dickens Project's educational programs.

Summer Session 2 Start!
2025-07-28 08:00
Welcome to the start Session 2! You can add and drop classes until the deadline for each session. Remember, they come up quickly in a five-week course!

Birds & Blooms Tours
2025-07-29 09:15 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Birds and Blooms tours are back for the summer! Bird language coach Jeff Caplan is just back from travels and will lead Arboretum tours about South Africa and Australia. These tours are kid and family friendly, bilingual in English and Spanish.
There will be a tour on every Tuesday for the next three weeks, which includes July 29th, August 5th, and August 12th. Bring binoculars and wear comfortable shoes. Tours begin in the visitor parking welcome area at 9:15 AM and last about two hours. Check out the Arboretum website or our Instagram @ucscarboretum for updates and more information.

IRB/ITS Webinar: Best Practices for Online Surveys in Research
2025-07-29 12:00
Join us for a one-hour webinar, Online Surveys in Research: Best Practices for Ethics, Security, and Success, featuring experst from ITS, the IRB, and the research community. Learn how to navigate common challenges with online survey tools, protect participant data, and esnure compliance with institutional and regulatory requirements.
This session is ideal for anyone conducting or planning to conduct online survey research.

SOLD OUT: Floral Arrangement Workshop
2025-08-03 10:00 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
This workshop is full.
Join Katie Wolf, creative director of Eothen event and design floral studio, for a morning of creativity and connection. Take what you learn in this workshop and apply these design principles to your next rendezvous with market bunches, garden cuts, and foraged wonders to bring beauty from the outdoors in.
We’ll begin with a short lecture and demonstration before heading out onto the UCSC Farm to gather our flowers and foliage to use in arrangements. We’ll then arrange together, with time for one-on-one tips, tricks, and feedback.

Johnson-Bey, S. (CMPM) - Designing Reusable Tools for Social Simulation-Driven Emergent Storytelling
2025-08-04 13:00
Narrative sandbox games rely heavily on simulation to produce emergent narrative experiences. Instead of featuring pre-authored central narratives, these games provide a play space, a sandbox, of various systems and mechanics players use to produce interesting narrative moments. This dissertation focuses on social simulation games, a subset of narrative sandbox games that drive the narrative experience by simulating individual characters and their social interactions. The core challenge of social simulation-driven emergent storytelling is complexity. Social simulations are complex to set up and complex to debug/balance. The entire narrative experience hinges on interesting events emerging from the complex interplay between systems. Small changes can have huge emergent effects on the dynamics of the story world. Game makers must constantly test their game to ensure behavior is consistent with their design intentions.
Event Host: Shi Johnson-Bey, PhD Candidate, Computational Media
Advisor: Michael Mateas

Community Day: Free Admission at the Arboretum
2025-08-05 09:00 - 17:00 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The first Tuesday of each month, the Arboretum is open without charge to visitors. See dates and times UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden is open. NOTE: Due to limited parking at the Arboretum and the popularity of Community Day, we greatly encourage visitors to carpool, bike, walk or use public transportation as much as possible.

Larsen, B. (CMPM) - Communal Narrative Play in Perennial Games
2025-08-05 10:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Online communities tell stories with the games they play. As continual updates, recurring monetization, and platforms for community discussions have flourished, we have seen a rise in video games using ongoing development to tell stories, and have a community interact with those stories and build upon them. In this dissertation, I study this phenomenon, which I call textit{perennial games}—storytelling experiences, which are perpetual, continuous, and tell an ongoing, communal story, where everyone influences its future in big and small ways. I study this especially as it has grown in the years 2010-2025, as the modern rise of the live-service game has exploded in popularity, and are using this format to tell stories in ways both unique yet also in ways that harks back to serial fiction, professional wrestling, modern television series, traditional mythology, and more. Through a three-pronged focus I study: 1) the games as narrative experiences, and how they facilitate narrative play through their design, 2) the communities who play them, how and why they play with the narrative and stay in these worlds for decades, and 3) the development, investigating the many joys and challenges of telling an ongoing story, following the inevitable oscillations as developers interact with the community. Through this multifaceted approach, I illustrate how perennial games cultivate community by inherently trading their mystery for familiarity, creating strong social bonds through the communal experience of uncovering, cataloging and deciphering mystery. Pushed forward by the inherent myth that these games will continue to change, the communities around them strain against and increasing lack of mystery, both seeking the safety of their social bonds while yearning for that which brought them there in the first place. Perennial games can be alluded to a developed garden, requiring maintenance and care, each year taking a subtly new shape, molded by its inhabitants and its caretakers, always a bit more wild than anyone can manage on their own, and as it grows the people inside it grow ever more dependent on its continued existence, until the promise that kept them there breaks.
Event Host: Bjarke Larsen, PhD Candidate, Computational Media
Advisor: Elin Carstensdottir

Exploring your science major
2025-08-06 17:00
Choosing a major can feel overwhelming, but many science students share a common academic path in their first year. This session breaks down the similarities in core coursework, introduces the range of science majors available, and helps you begin thinking about where your interests align. To receive a Zoom link, register HERE.

Rose, N. (BMEB) - MACHINE LEARNING MODELS FOR T CELL RECEPTOR TARGET DISCOVERY AND AFFINITY ENGINEERING
2025-08-07 10:30 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
T cell receptors (TCRs) mediate antigen-specific immune responses through recognition of peptides presented by major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) molecules. Accurately predicting TCR–pMHC interactions remains a major barrier to TCR-based immunotherapy, due to limitations in current models that fail to generalize beyond common viral epitopes and well-characterized HLA alleles. In this PhD proposal, I outline a computational framework that integrates deep learning, structural modeling, and molecular simulation to improve TCR–pMHC prediction and discovery. I first introduce TRIOPS, a convolutional neural network trained on harmonized, experimentally validated data to predict MHC restriction from TCR sequence alone. TRIOPS outperforms state-of-the-art models in both held-out evaluation and independent patient datasets, demonstrating improved accuracy in assigning TCRs to their correct restricting MHC alleles. I then propose TRILOBITE, a two-part structure-based model combining atomic-resolution graph representations and dynamics-derived biophysical features to classify TCR–pMHC binding and estimate affinity. Finally, I propose an end-to-end pipeline to identify tumor-reactive TCRs from patient-derived sequencing data by integrating HLA typing, antigen prediction, structure generation, and binding assessment. Applied to a pan-cancer atlas of over 1.2 million T cells, this framework will enable high-throughput, structure-informed TCR discovery across diverse HLA backgrounds. Together, these aims address a critical need for scalable, mechanistically grounded methods for mapping T cell specificity to accelerate cancer immunotherapy discovery.
Event Host: Nicholas Rose, PhD student, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: Vanessa Jonsson

Slugs at Sundown - The Art of the Career Pivot
2025-08-07 17:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Thinking about making a career change? Join fellow Banana Slugs for an evening of connection and guidance from professional career coaches. Learn how to navigate transitions with confidence, gain practical strategies, and get inspired to take the next step in your journey—whether you’re pivoting by choice or by chance.
Bonus: Come early for a 15-minute, one-on-one resume review—available from 4:30 to 5:30 PM.

Katte, P. (BMEB) - Interactive and Scalable Frameworks for Pathogen Surveillance and Ancestral Recombination Graph
2025-08-08 14:00 | Biomedical Sciences Building, 575 McLaughlin Drive
The explosive growth of genomic data, driven by advances in sequencing and inference technologies, presents both an opportunity and a challenge for evolutionary biology and public health. Existing visualization and analysis tools often fall short in handling the scale, complexity, and uncertainty of modern genomic datasets—especially in the areas of pathogen surveillance and ancestral recombination inference. This thesis introduces new tools that provide scalable visualization and analysis to bridge these gaps and enable more interpretable and actionable genomic insights.
First, I develop an interactive dashboard within a tool called WEPP for wastewater-based pathogen surveillance. It combines phylogenetic placement with intuitive web-based visualization, allowing public health officials to track variant spread at high resolution. Second, I build Lorax, a browser-based platform for visualizing Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) at biobank scale. Lorax incorporates a multi-agent system that supports natural language querying, code generation, and interactive tree exploration. Finally, I introduce a novel inference framework based on Generative Flow Networks to sample from posterior distributions over ARGs, addressing key limitations in uncertainty quantification and scalability found in existing methods. Together, these tools aim to make the study of evolution and disease more accessible and effective, helping researchers and public health teams draw clearer conclusions from complex genetic data.
Event Host: Pratik Katte, PhD Student, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: Russ Corbett-Detig

Vera-Choqqueccota, S. (BMEB) - A CRISPRi-Based platform for multimodal functional analysis of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders risk genes in engineered mouse cortical neurons
2025-08-08 15:00
Neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders (NPDs), such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia, are among the most heritable yet mechanistically complex conditions. While large-scale genomic studies have identified hundreds of high-confidence risk genes, the lack of scalable and integrative platforms has limited our ability to functionally characterize these genes. To address this, I am developing a CRISPR interference (CRISPRi)-based screening platform using mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) engineered to express Ngn2 for rapid and standardized neuronal differentiation and dCas9-KRAB for gene repression. In Aim 1, I will generate and validate this cell line, enabling reproducible and scalable perturbation of disease-relevant genes. In Aim 2, I will apply this system to characterize the effects of knocking down ten NPD-risk genes using multimodal analysis of morphology, transcriptomics, and electrophysiology. In Aim 3, I will build a framework to crowdsource functional analysis of NPD risk genes to design gRNAs, access experiments remotely, and analyze data using simplified, accessible tools. Together, this project advances both scientific understanding of NPD mechanisms and equitable access to functional analysis.
Event Host: Samira Vera-Choqqueccota, PhD Student, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: David Haussler

Montenegro, C. (ECE) - Control of Uncertain Hybrid Systems
2025-08-11 14:00
Machine learning endows autonomous systems to uncover underlying structures and physical laws from measured data and to leverage these models for prediction and decision-making. As the costs of data acquisition, processing, and storage decline—and sensors become increasingly widespread alongside ever-improving algorithms—artificial intelligence has attracted significant attention in research and industry.
Machine-learning methods are particularly attractive when an analytical model is too difficult—or even impossible—to derive because the underlying principles are poorly understood. As control engineering enters such domains—for example, physical human-robot interaction and self-driving vehicles—data-driven models offer a practical alternative to classical system-identification techniques for model-based control. In addition, we know that robotic or control systems seldom work in ideal conditions. Sensor noise, incomplete state information, and uncertain parameters are everyday realities, and controllers must be robust—able to attenuate these disturbances—and be backed by formal guarantees of stability and safety.
Coupling physical dynamics with embedded computation and communication introduces new challenges. Hardware elements such as analog-to-digital converters, sample-and-hold circuits, and quantizers, together with events like timers, resets, and impacts, yield an even more complex class of control systems in which designing controllers that remain robust to unmodeled dynamics and disturbances—and providing formal certificates of stability and safety—becomes harder. Cyber-physical systems that have continuous dynamics with event-driven behavior, therefore, require control strategies that explicitly account for these events and stay robust to adversarial uncertainties.
Therefore, the focus of this proposal is to design learning-based certificates and control techniques for hybrid systems with uncertainties in the form of unmodeled dynamics and unknown disturbances. We propose four research thrusts in this proposal. The first one addresses the problem of learning a surrogate model of the unmodeled using learning-based models that are both statistically sound and directly usable for feedback design. In the second thrust, we develop a safety control framework for systems whose dynamics are learned with high probability using a set-valued and variational analysis. In our third thrust, we consider the problem of learning certificates—in particular, Lyapunov functions and cost upper-bound surrogates—for hybrid systems. Finally, we tackle the optimal control problem for hybrid systems under unknown disturbances in our fourth thrust.
Event Host: Carlos Montenegro, PhD Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: Ricardo Sanfelice

August Slugs & Steins with Professor Nancy N. Chen
2025-08-11 18:30
Breathing in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Breath, Air, and Vitality
This presentation examines breathing in the present moment when humans vastly transform Earth ecosystems that impact health and well-being. Atmospheric transformations via worsened air highlight connections of breath with health. How might breath be shaped by cultural and individual experiences? Ethnographic research at the intersections of medical and environmental anthropology have renewed attention on energetic relations between bodies, landscapes, air, and health, especially the role of vital energy in qi, prana, or ha. In addition to these breath centered approaches, we examine recent biomedical research on breath management across a broad range of complementary medicine and health interventions.

Ghosh, S. (CMPM) - Scientific Sensemaking with Spatial Data in Collaborative Virtual Reality
2025-08-12 09:00
Collaborative virtual reality environments have the potential to greatly impact scientific progress, especially those relating to existential human problems. Within these virtual environments, scientists could view and interact with spatial data in applications as part of their sensemaking process, however, there are design challenges and barriers to development. This advancement document presents research questions related to the design of these technologies, and a project schedule for completing the dissertation. In the first part, Virtual Reality for Scientific Sensemaking, I describe prior, current, and future work related to collaboratively designing interfaces with scientific domain experts across civil engineering and marine science. In the second part, Taxonomy, I describe current and future work to categorize and generalize XR input patterns for collaborative virtual environments, as these works have been shown to fundamentally enable the design of many apps. In the final part, Open Source Infrastructure Stability, I describe my effort to support the ecosystem through the contribution of interoperable, low-resource, and extensible open source software.
Event Host: Samir Ghosh, PhD Student, Computational Media
Advisor: Katherine Isbister

Mawhorter, R. (CSE) - Certified Synthesis for Interactive Media: High Assurance Metroidvania Generation
2025-08-12 10:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Program verification has been applied in many contexts (including videogames), but the scale and complexity of the examples that have been analyzed fall short of the ability to analyze many existing games without massive computational costs. My research focuses on automatic analysis and design of one particular game: Super Metroid, with the goal of creating general methods for efficient analysis that address these issues. In pursuit of this goal, I develop novel abstraction strategies that can be reapplied in other contexts. I also show that these same techniques can also be used to synthesize games, and I develop a paradigm for understanding procedural generation problems as verification problems. This paradigm enables generators to certify their output, and these certificates act as a powerful debugging tool. My research expands on existing techniques for applying symbolic search to large state spaces, exploring many different ways of optimizing the state space representation, and reporting on their relative effectiveness in real-world contexts. I also demonstrate how multiple layers of abstraction can be used to enhance existing search algorithms. Using these methods, I show how verifying properties of software with respect to the humans that interact with it can be practically achieved.
Event Host: Ross Mawhorter, PhD Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advsior: Adam Smith
