Barnstorm Presents: Musical Theater Showcase
2025-12-04 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.
—
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.
—
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)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Operation Unplug! Pledge to Leave Campus Sustainability this Winter Break
2025-12-05 00:00 - 2026-01-03 23:59, 2025-12-06 00:00 - 2026-01-04 23:59, 2025-12-07 00:00 - 2026-01-05 23:59, 2025-12-08 00:00 - 2026-01-06 23:59, 2025-12-09 00:00 - 2026-01-07 23:59 | CA
UCSC Energy Management and the Sustainability Office are leading the first annual “Operation Unplug” campaign to conserve energy (and reduce greenhouse gas emissions) during winter break. Before leaving your residence hall, apartment, or office, please unplug any fridges or minifridges, computers and/or monitors, power strips, and all other energy intensive appliances or equipment! Take the pledge and/or upload a photo of what you unplugged to the campaign’s google form for raffle entries to win one of two $50 gift certificates. Recruit your friends and coworkers for an additional entry each and try to be the winning building (the building with the most participants is guaranteed one raffle winner)! Operation Unplug is open to all students, staff, and faculty. Be the slug that pulls the plug!

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
—
ADMISSION
FREE and open to the public.
—
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.

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,
—
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.

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.
—
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.

John O. Jordan: "Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop"
2025-12-07 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
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.
—
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]

de Priester, J. (ECE) - Hybrid Reinforcement Learning
2025-12-08 13:00 - 14:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm that trains a decision maker, or policy, by learning from interaction with an environment. The power of RL lies in its ability to learn complex strategies without explicit human instruction, which can lead to better solutions that human designers overlook in domains ranging from robotics to scientific discovery. Despite these successes, applying RL to safety-critical control systems remains a significant challenge due to the fragility of black-box policies. Standard RL controllers are prone to “chattering” or indecisiveness, which is rapid, detrimental switching between decisions induced by small disturbances, and lack formal closed-loop safety, stability, and robustness guarantees. Furthermore, existing discrete and continuous-time RL paradigms struggle to model hybrid systems, where continuous state evolution is intertwined with instantaneous discrete updates. Consequently, standard RL approaches cannot effectively be applied to safety-critical hybrid dynamical systems, as such approaches suffer from discretization artifacts, computational inefficiency, and a lack of closed-loop safety, stability, and robustness guarantees.
To bridge the gap between hybrid control theory and RL, this research proposal is organized into four interconnected thrusts. Thrust 1 addresses the fragility of existing standard RL-based policies by designing RL algorithms to construct robust hybrid supervisors to eliminate chattering. Thrust 2 establishes the theoretical bedrock of a native hybrid RL formulation. By leveraging insights from discounted MPC, the hybrid RL problem is formulated with intrinsic closed-loop stability, safety, and robustness properties. Thrust 3 extends standard RL components to the hybrid domain to create RL algorithms capable of solving the hybrid RL problem defined in Thrust 2. Finally, Thrust 4 provides comprehensive empirical validation, confirming the robustness of the supervisors from Thrust 1 and demonstrating the advantages of the native hybrid RL formulation developed in Thrusts 2 and 3 over a standard RL formulation.
Host: Jan de Priester, Ph.D. Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Ricardo Sanfelice
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95229790206?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 981137

Ferdous, N. (CSE) - SPECSIM : A Simulation Infrastructure Mitigating Transient Timing Attacks
2025-12-08 13:00 - 14:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Transient execution attacks are serious security threats in modern-day processors. Out-of-order execution compels the processor to access data that should not be otherwise perceived. Leakage of that secret information creates a covert channel for the attacker for various types of transient and speculative attacks. Transient based execution attacks emanate when the secret information is leaked by the execution of transient instructions which are executed by the processor but never got committed from the processor pipeline. However, on the microarchitectural level, the effect of these transient instructions is noticeable. Generally, microarchitectural state is the state that a processor maintains to improve performance which is transparent to software. The secret data retained in the microarchitectural state are susceptible to create a covert channel and thereby are at higher risk to be observed by the attacker for transient attacks.
This research work presents a robust and secure simulation infrastructure that implements multiple strategies to mitigate transient attacks in the timing domain. This work proposes various strategies e.g., Reorder Buffer Transient Flushing Technique in Randomized Transient Pipeline, SpecSCB for making the speculative instructions invisible to the architectural state, for the mitigation of the timing attack. In this work, transient instructions are added in the proposed Randomized Transient Pipeline and are flushed effectively, using Transient Flushing Techniques, squashing all the transient instruction residues that could remain in the Randomized Transient Pipeline. This flushing strategy also ensures no difference in the execution time of the base simulation and the proposed Randomized Transient Simulation, leaving no leakage for transient based timing attacks. In addition to the simulation platform, a novel Transient Verification Framework is also proposed which consists of Global Time Signature Verification Model and Retirement Time Signature Verification Model. The transient verification framework identifies if there is any anomaly in the timing domain, related to all existing instructions, which could leave space for covert channel for timing attacks. Overall, this work has provided an extensive and robust simulation platform infrastructure for the researchers to explore various types of attacks with their respective mitigating solutions.
Host: Nilufar Ferdous, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Jose Renau
Zoom- https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84111701472?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- Qi1pAk

Wang, Y. (CSE) - Toward Practical and Effective Large Language Model Unlearning
2025-12-08 14:00 - 15:00
The growing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into real-world applications has heightened concerns about their trustworthiness, as models may reveal private information, reproduce copyrighted content, propagate biases, or generate harmful instructions. These risks, alongside emerging privacy regulations, motivate the need for LLM unlearning, methods that remove the influence of specific data while preserving overall model capability.
This proposal investigates how to design practical and effective unlearning methods that enable LLMs to produce reliable and responsible outputs. We study both training-free and training-based paradigms. On the training-free side, we introduce ECO, which achieves unlearning via embedding-corrupted prompts detected by a lightweight classifier, and DRAGON, a generalizable black-box framework that combines detection with chain-of-thought guard reasoning for safe in-context intervention. On the training-based side, we present FLAT, a forget-data-only loss adjustment method grounded in a variational $f$-divergence formulation.
Together, these approaches provide complementary strategies for aligning LLM behavior with safety and regulatory requirements while maintaining general utility. This proposal outlines their motivation, design, empirical performance, and the broader research plan toward responsible and accountable LLM systems.
Host: Yaxuan Wang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Yang Liu
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94186242839?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 786334

Human Resource Management Program Info Session
2025-12-08 18:00 - 19:00
Immigration and Workforce Strategy: Creating Successful Teams
Join Program Chair Philip Ziman and explore UCSC Silicon Valley’s Human Resource Management certificate, designed to help you recruit, develop, and retain top talent in a changing global landscape. Learn to align HR strategies with business goals, leverage AI-driven people analytics for stronger workforce insights, and navigate the evolving immigration climate and policy shaping today’s labor market.

Advance Your HR Skills and Credentials
Gain expertise in talent acquisition, leadership development, employee relations, and compliance while understanding how AI and automation are transforming HR practices. This HRCI- and SHRM-approved program offers pre-approved recertification credits and prepares you to lead inclusive, data-informed teams that thrive amid shifts in immigration policy, workforce mobility, and global competition.
This winter info session is sponsored by the Human Resource Management program.

Reserve your spot! Register today.

Ecosystem of Care Webinar: Career Success
2025-12-08 18:00 - 19:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/ecosystem-of-care-webinar-career-success/
The Division of Student Affairs and Success invites parents and families to the next installment of the Ecosystem of Care webinar series, featuring Career Success. The Ecosystem of Care virtual webinar series offers engaging and informative sessions are designed for families of our Slugs to connect, gain valuable insights, and access resources that support their students’ residential experience at UCSC.
In this session, the Career Success team will share how students can find internships, gain meaningful experience, and build the skills employers value. You’ll also learn about the full range of Career resources—plus practical ways you can encourage and support your student’s confidence, growth, and career success.
Register to attend.

December Slugs and Steins with Richard Mahon (Cowell ’78)
2025-12-08 18:30 - 20:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/december-slugs-and-steins-with-richard-mahon-cowell-78/
Interactive Reflection on our Collective Memories: 60 Years of UCSC
For this month’s Slugs & Steins, we will close out the year and say goodbye to the first quarter of the 21st century with UCSC alumnus Richard Mahon. Richard will guide us in reflecting on UCSC after 60 years and on our collective time attending the university.
Whether you graduated as part of the pioneer class or only in the past few years, this month’s Slugs and Steins will ask you to look at how your experience studying at UC Santa Cruz helped shape and mold your life. Richard will share his perspectives about the experiences of UCSC students from both his time there as a student and instructor, and as a parent of a UCSC graduate. He will incorporate lessons from an English composition class he is currently teaching at Allan Hancock College, a California community college in Santa Maria, which looks at how family and education are crucial determinants of a person’s life. Richard will invite alumni to share what UCSC has meant to them, and to reflect on what alumni can do to keep the promise of a transformative UC education for young people coming of age in California today. Please be prepared to share your thoughts and experiences if you wish.
Register here.

Business Administration Info Session
2025-12-09 06:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Strong business skills are the key to success.
Join our live virtual discussion to explore how our courses and expert instructors can help you build a versatile and successful career in business.
We’ll talk about business leadership essentials and management science as well as practical skills crucial for everyday business operations and strategies. Our curriculum is uniquely designed to provide you with the competitive tools you need for career success.
Highlights

Insights into emerging trends in business, such as AI, and their impact on job opportunities.
Networking opportunities with industry professionals and experienced instructors.
Comprehensive overview of our Business Administration Certificate Program.

This is a great opportunity to understand how new business skills can inform your leadership style for today’s dynamic business environment.
Sponsor
This info session is sponsored by the UCSC Silicon Valley Professional Education Business Administration certificate program.
Register today.

Finals Relief: Boba and Massage
2025-12-09 13:00 - 15:00 | Quarry Plaza, Student Union, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Take a break from the stress of studying for finals and enjoy boba and a short massage on the head and neck.
It’s free for UCSC students and will be held in the Quarry Plaza on Tuesday, December 9, 1-3 p.m.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.

Zhu, R. (ECE) - From Neuromorphic Principles to Efficient Neural Language Architectures
2025-12-09 16:00 - 17:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
While Large Language Models exhibit remarkable capabilities, their reliance on the standard Transformer architecture imposes prohibitive computational costs and quadratic memory complexity. To bridge the gap between biological efficiency and high-performance AI, we have established foundational work in linearizing attention and maximizing hardware utilization through architectures such as RWKV and MatMul-Free networks. Addressing the remaining bottlenecks in long-term memory consolidation and optimization stability, we propose a research roadmap focused on “In-Place Test-Time Training” (TTT) to enable compositional memory via dynamic weight updates, and the Muon optimizer to stabilize deep reasoning through orthogonal gradient updates. Ultimately, this work aims to unify neuromorphic principles with scalable deep learning to enable robust performance in resource-efficient environments.
Event Host: Ridger Zhu, Ph.D. Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Jason Eshraghian
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95241268060?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 256794
