Events

Megha Majumdar - A Guardian and a Thief
2025-12-02 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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

Free Coffee, Tea, & More with Merrill Provost Aims McGuinness
2025-12-03 09:00 - 11:00
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]

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.

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, 257 Cowell-Stevenson Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
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

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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
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.

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

First Friday Alumni Event at the IAS
2025-12-05 17:00 - 19:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Join fellow Banana Stugs past and present on First Friday at the IAS. This alumni-focused event will feature immersive art and science exhibition tours led by current students as well as refreshments, crafts, and other entertainment.
Tours will be offered at 5:30 and 6:30 pm of Weather and the Whale, an art and science exhibition about climate change organized with Ari Friedlaender.
First Friday is FREE and open to the public.

First Friday Slug Meetup at the Institute of Arts and Sciences
2025-12-05 17:30 - 20:30 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Spend First Friday with fellow Slugs at the Institute of Arts and Sciences (IAS) on December 5.
Enjoy student-led tours of Weather and the Whale (at 5:30 & 6:00 p.m.), connect with University Archivist and Alumni Councilor Kelsey Knox (Porter ’12), and continue the evening at Venus Spirits Distillery with drinks and Alumni Association–provided appetizers.
RSVP today!

UCSC Concert Choir
2025-12-05 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the UC Santa Cruz Concert Choir for a fall concert. Directed by Nathaniel Berman,
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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.
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PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $5 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.
– 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.

Welcome to the City: Los Angeles (South L.A.)
2025-12-06 09:00 - 13:00 | Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, 1734 E. 41st Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90058, United States
Join us for Welcome to the City in Los Angeles (South L.A.), hosted in partnership with the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. The project will be held Saturday, December 6 from 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. at the Food Bank (1734 E 41st St, Los Angeles, CA 90058). Please register in advance to help us and our non-profit partner plan accordingly.
Project Description:
Volunteers will complete a variety of essential tasks, most of which involve inspecting, sorting, and packing food for distribution.
Welcome to the City is an annual series of regional events which help alumni connect with their local UCSC community. While the program is designed with recent grads in mind, all are welcome to participate.
Please contact alumni@ucsc.edu with questions.

First Saturday Tour at the Arboretum
2025-12-06 11:00 - 12:00 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
First Saturday Tours are a wonderful way to introduce yourself to the Arboretum or to deepen your knowledge of the Arboretum’s plant collections. Each tour is a little different depending on the time of year, the interests of the tour guide, and the people who join in. For example, you might learn about the birds and mammals that make this land their home or about the amazing physical adaptations that plants have evolved to better deal with our extreme weather and climate conditions. Tours are free with paid admission.

Arts and Unwind
2025-12-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Stevenson Event Center, Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Need a break? Come hang out, relax, and make some art! We’ll have beading, scrapbooking, drawing, painting—basically all the crafty vibes you need to unwind. Plus, don’t miss the tie-dye station where you can make your own Slug Family T-shirt. All supplies are provided.
Come chill, get creative, and take a breather with fellow Slugs!

UCSC Jazz Combos
2025-12-06 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the UC Santa Cruz Jazz Combos for a fall concert. Directed by Charles Hamilton.
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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.
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PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $5 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.
– 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.

John O. Jordan: "Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop"
2025-12-07 13:00 - 15:00
Please join the Dickens Project for the rescheduled Dickens Universe talk by John Jordan, Dickens Project Co-Founder and Co-Director. Delve into the sounds of The Old Curiosity Shop on Sunday, December 7, from 1:00-2:30 PM (Pacific time).
Critics have long recognized and commented on the striking visual quality of Dickens’s writing, including the ways in which his novels seem to have anticipated and even influenced the development of certain film techniques. With the exception of studies that focus on speech and voice, relatively little attention has been paid to Dickens’s representation of sound more generally. In this paper, Professor Jordan takes a sound studies approach to Dickens’s writing, focusing on The Old Curiosity Shop and examining the various uses to which sound is put in this exceptionally “noisy” book.
John O. Jordan is a research professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Co-Director of the Dickens Project. His primary research interests include Victorian literature and culture, Charles Dickens and narrative theory. John is the author of Supposing Bleak House and co-editor, with Robert Patten and Catherine Waters, of the Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens.
Register for the talk on Zoom.

UCSC Jazz Big Band with guest artist Benny Green
2025-12-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the UC Santa Cruz Jazz Big Band for a fall concert with guest artist Benny Green. Directed by Charles Hamilton.
This very special concert will feature a variety of notable jazz pieces composed by jazz innovator and pianist Thelonious Monk, including Ruby, My Dear and Rhythm a Ning. Green’s For Duke Pearson, which was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, will also be part of the program.
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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 $5 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.
– 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.

Jamilan, S. (CSE) - Profile-guided Compiler Optimizations for Data Center Workloads
2025-12-08 09:15 - 10:30 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Modern applications, such as data center workloads, have become increasingly complex. These applications primarily operate on massive datasets, which involve large memory footprints, irregular access patterns, and complex control and data flows. The processor-memory speed gap, combined with these complexities, can lead to unexpected performance inefficiencies in these applications, preventing them from achieving optimal performance. Considering the complexity and size of data center applications, manually identifying and resolving performance issues is often impractical or impossible. Instead, developing new compiler optimization techniques can be a more effective and scalable solution to boost both performance and energy efficiency. In this thesis, we focus on identifying the root causes that limit the performance of data center workloads. We analyze the limitations of current profile-guided compiler optimization techniques for addressing these performance gaps. Finally, we propose two profile-guided optimization techniques, APT-GET and RIFS, which can be integrated into the LLVM optimization pipeline to deliver further improvements. To hide the long latency of memory accesses, we introduce APT-GET, a profile-guided technique that ensures timely prefetches by leveraging dynamic execution-time information to build a novel analytical model that finds the optimal prefetch distance and injection site based on the collected profile. We study APT-GET across 10 real-world applications and demonstrate that it achieves a speedup of up to 1.98× and an average of 1.30×. To enable runtime value-invariant function specialization to reduce redundant operations, we introduce RIFS, a profile-guided compiler technique that specializes functions based on runtime-invariant call-site-specific argument values. RIFS introduces a novel value-profiling LLVM pass to identify runtime invariant arguments and a subsequent LLVM transformation pass to generate specialized function variants tailored to these value profiles. To efficiently select among potentially thousands of specialization candidates, we develop a predictive cost model that estimates each candidate’s performance benefit before code generation. RIFS achieves an average speedup of 5.3% and an instruction reduction of 2.5% over the LLVM -O3+PGO baseline across 12 real-world applications.
Host: Saba Jamilan, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Heiner Litz
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95818759324?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 652917

CSE Colloquium: Making Systems Secure with Information Flow
2025-12-08 09:30 - 10:45 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Andrew Myers, Cornell University

Abstract:
Modern civilization depends on complex, interconnected software systems that must safeguard trustworthy or private data. We have ever-growing mountains of code yet lack principled ways to build large systems that are secure. What is missing is a way to securely build these systems compositionally: module by module and layer by layer. Information flow control, enforced throughout software and hardware, offers a plausible way to achieve compositional security, and is increasingly being used by industry. I describe how my research group has incorporated information-flow security into various languages and systems: hardware architectures resilient to timing and speculation attacks, smart contracts, and automatically synthesized cryptographic and distributed protocols. Information flow is inherently compositional and makes possible strong, provable security guarantees that can be connected to cryptographic security definitions. Importantly, it also guides developers during the design process, exposing security-critical decisions up front.
Bio:
Andrew Myers is the Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, advised by Barbara Liskov. His research interests include programming languages, computer security, and distributed and persistent programming systems. His work on computer security has focused on practical, sound, expressive languages and systems for enforcing information security. Myers is an ACM Fellow and has authored several award-winning papers. He currently serves as the chair of the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee.
Hosted By: Professor Mohsen Lesani
Location: Engineering 2, E2-180
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97682837116?pwd=[REDACTED]
