Events

Project and Program Management Info Session
2025-12-15 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Advance your career in project and program management.
As organizations tackle more complex initiatives, the demand for skilled project leaders continues to grow. Learn how professionals across industries use Agile methods, AI tools, and data-driven insights to manage scope, schedule, and cost effectively.
Join Tim Bombosch, chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Project and Program Management program, for an inside look at how our courses can help you strengthen your leadership, planning, and communication skills to deliver results and move your career forward.
This winter info session is sponsored by the Project and Program Management program.
Register today.

Merrill College Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program
2025-12-15 08:00 - 2026-01-23 17:00 | CA
The program offers Merrill students an invaluable professional opportunity: the chance to work closely with a faculty member and get the kind of experience and advice that can prepare students for graduate or professional school or a career. Students who participate in the program will be employed as Research Assistants.
This program enables Merrill College Faculty Fellows to benefit from paid research assistance from an undergraduate affiliate of Merrill College.
The application is submitted by the faculty member rather than the student.
For additional information and application: DEADLINE EXTENDED to January 23, 2026
Merrill College Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program

Operation Unplug! Pledge to Leave Campus Sustainability this Winter Break
2025-12-15 00:00 - 2026-01-13 23:59, 2025-12-14 00:00 - 2026-01-12 23:59, 2025-12-13 00:00 - 2026-01-11 23:59, 2025-12-12 00:00 - 2026-01-10 23:59, 2025-12-11 00:00 - 2026-01-09 23:59, 2025-12-10 00:00 - 2026-01-08 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!

Fermentation Basics
2025-12-14 10:00 - 12:30 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Unlock the secrets of delicious, healthy, and home-crafted food at our Home Fermentation Workshop! This hands-on class dives deep into the art and science of fermentation, from understanding how beneficial microbes transform basic ingredients into delicious, healthy foods, to exploring a variety of home fermentation projects—including demonstrations of ferments like pickled vegetables and tangy yogurt. Then, roll up your sleeves for an interactive session where you’ll make your own batch of sauerkraut to take home, guided step-by-step in a friendly, supportive environment. Whether you’re a complete beginner or looking to expand your skills, you’ll leave with newfound confidence, inspiration, and your first jar of homemade kraut ready to ferment on your kitchen counter.
About the Instructor:
Anna Lee is a lecturer in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She is a Master Composter and a Master Food Preserver through UC Cooperative Extension and holds an advanced certificate in ecological horticulture from the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz and an MS in agroecology from University of Wisconsin, Madison.

REGISTER

Science in the Neighborhood: The End Game: Discovering how telomeres cause disease
2025-12-11 18:00 - 19:30 | Coastal Biology Building, 130 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Science In the Neighborhood
A public lecture series hosted quarterly by the UC Santa Cruz Science Division
The End Game: Discovering how telomeres cause disease
Presentation by Carol Greider, Professor, UC Santa Cruz
Q&A with Susan Carpenter, Professor, UC Santa Cruz
Telomeres, the ends of chromosomes, play a pivotal role in human disease. Short telomeres cause age-related degenerative disease, while long telomeres predispose people to cancer. That’s why understanding how telomere length is regulated is so critical. Dr. Greider’s research is uncovering the mechanism of telomere length regulation so that we can devise approaches for disease treatment. By using new DNA-sequencing technology in a novel way, her team made a surprising discovery: Each chromosome end has a unique telomere-length distribution that is different from other chromosome ends. Dr. Greider will explain how this finding will help us better understand the role of telomeres in disease.
The event is in-person only. Register here.
December 11, 2025 | 6:00–7:30 p.m.
Coastal Biology Building. Rm. 110
UC Santa Cruz Coastal Campus
130 McAllister Way
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
The screenshot below shows where to find the entrance of the Coastal Biology Building.

ECE Supervision and Administration Info Session
2025-12-11 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Step into leadership in early childhood education.
The need for skilled supervisors and administrators in early learning programs continues to grow. Childcare centers, preschools, and early education organizations all rely on leaders who can manage teams, ensure quality, and meet state standards.
We’ll explore the key roles in early childhood supervision and administration—site director, program manager, owner/operator—and the essential skills to lead with confidence.
Topics

Curriculum planning
Staff development
Budgeting
Compliance
Best practices shaping the field

Speaker
Program Chair Ninet Moradi will lead our session while offering an inside look at how our flexible, fully online professional certificate helps you meet state permit requirements and advance your career in early childhood leadership.
This winter info session is sponsored by the ECE Supervision and Administration certificate program.

Register today.

Laffan, N. (CM) - Digital Memory Tools and Their Impact On Collective Remembering
2025-12-11 13:00 - 15:00
Today, both individual and collective memories are increasingly mediated by digital platforms. Both are fundamentally enmeshed in platform ecosystems that orient around commercial imperatives very much at odds with community cohesion. The digital archive where our mediated memories are stored does not merely store information but actively inscribes it, often privileging narratives aligned with commercial incentives rather than community cohesion. This invisibility is a problem: as we offload our personal memories onto commercial tools, we unwittingly subject our shared past to algorithmic curation and “algo-time,” which raises serious questions about how the use of our personal devices is quietly restructuring the way societies remember.
During this presentation, I will propose a three-pronged method of investigating and engaging in this conceptual space. All three prongs revolve around a shared question : how do the technologies that extend our personal memories affect what we remember collectively? The research first establishes a conceptual ecology around the question by tracing the lifecycle of a single image from individual capture to platform archive. Second, it employs Research through Design (RtD) and speculative design methods to prototype tools explicitly built for collective remembrance rather than commercial extraction. Finally, it utilizes artistic practice to “diffract” these concepts, creating interactive installations that expose the distortions and contradictions inherent in digital memory. Together, these projects aim to make visible the hidden dynamics that shape the memories we construct together.
Host: Nate Laffan, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media
Advisor: Nathan Altice
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93762016105?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 668969

Chambers, K. (BMEB) - Using Genomics and Artificial Intelligence to improve prognosis for osteosarcoma patients
2025-12-11 12:00 - 14:00
Transcriptomic profiling has been transformative in pediatric oncology. Pediatric cancers arise from disrupted developmental programs. Their impaired transcriptional states reflect cell lineage infidelity, aberrant differentiation, and immune-microenvironment interactions distinct from those of adult tumors(Gröbner et al., 2018; X. Ma et al., 2018). Within the osteosarcoma (OS) landscape, despite being the most common bone tumor of childhood, it remains one of the least genomically characterized pediatric cancers. Advancements in survival for localized disease, outcomes for metastatic or recurrent OS have remained stagnant for decades. Transcriptomics characterization of OS has facilitated the exposure of the unique chromothripsis patterns associated with the disease (Sayles et al., 2019; Schott et al., 2023). Largely, progress in OS genomics is still limited by the lack of harmonized, cross-study datasets accessible to researchers. I detail my contributions to OS research, beginning with the curation of the largest publicly available and harmonized RNA-sequencing osteosarcoma dataset (Chapter 2). A continuous part of my research involved the systematic democratization, aggregation, harmonization, and open sharing of pediatric cancer transcriptomic datasets within the Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative (Beale et al., 2025). This dataset provided a foundation for the analyses and discoveries presented in this dissertation. I utilize the multi-cohort and transcriptomic multi-omic public OS dataset to discover and define biologically meaningful subtypes that may explain differences in progression and treatment response (Chapter 3). Finally, I expand these advanced computational approaches into the realm of diagnostic pathology by evaluating strategies for integrating generative AI into rare cancer classification. I leverage both general and domain-specific diffusion models alongside GPT-4o–generated pathology prompts to guide histologic image synthesis (Chapter 4). In summary, my work advances transcriptional subtyping in OS by leveraging transcriptomic data to identify molecular subtypes of OS that could inform treatment strategies.
Host: Krizia Chambers, Ph.D. Candidate, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: Olena Vaske
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93569812001?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 915392

Tran, L. (BMEB) - Polysome Shadowing: A Long-Read Sequencing Approach to Study Translation
2025-12-11 09:00 - 11:00 | Biomedical Sciences Building, 575 McLaughlin Drive
Translation is a central and highly regulated step of gene expression, yet there are few quantitative, high-throughput tools to study translation. Existing methods such as sucrose gradients provide only bulk ribosome counts, while Ribo-Seq offers positional information in the genome but destroys long-range structure and transcript expression information. Because of these limitations, many fundamental questions about mRNA translation into protein remain difficult to assay. In this proposal, I outline my plans to develop a novel technology, deemed Polysome Shadowing, that covalently marks ribosome-unprotected regions of RNA with hyperactive base editors. Because ribosomes protect ~21–30 nt regions of mRNAs, ribosome “shadows” appear as tracts of unedited bases in long-read sequencing. In Aim 1, I will identify ribosome shadows on single molecules by increasing editing efficiency through optimization of dual cytosine and adenosine base editors and statistical modeling. In Aim 2, I will maximize the accuracy of information recovered from highly-edited RNAs by developing a multipass library preparation protocol to generate high-confidence reads. In Aim 3, I will apply the tools I have already developed to examine previously difficult-to-assay paradigms of translational control in the form of viral frameshifting mechanisms. Together, completion of these aims will build an information-rich sequencing technology capable of positioning ribosomes on intact mRNAs while preserving long-range information and establish feasibility to study nascent paradigms.
Host: Liam Tran, Ph.D. Student, Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics
Advisor: Joshua Arribere

Data Science and Analytics Info Session
2025-12-10 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
Data analysts are in high demand
Even as hiring slows in certain tech sectors, organizations across industries are actively seeking professionals with data expertise. The ability to extract insights from data has become essential to business success, creating abundant opportunities for skilled analysts.
Discover the expanding landscape of Data Science and Data Analytics careers, and learn which in-demand skills will set your resume apart from the competition. Explore how AI is transforming the field and creating new opportunities for those who can harness its potential.
Whether you’re starting fresh or advancing your career, our comprehensive courses and expert instructors will equip you with the practical skills employers are looking for. Take the next step toward landing your ideal role in this dynamic, growing field.
Speaker
Partha Padmanabhan, chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Data Science program, talks about how to learn these skills and prepare for the job market.
Sponsor
This winter info session series event is sponsored by the Data Science and Data Analytics Certificate program.

Register today.

The Everett Program Presents: Envisioning Digital Justice Together | 7th Annual Project Showcase
2025-12-10 15:30 - 19:00 | Merrill Cultural Center, 200 McLaughlin Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The Everett Program Presents: Envisioning Digital Justice Together | 7th Annual Project Showcase
This showcase aims to highlight the incredible work of our students, who have completed a year-long practicum conceptualizing and using digital technology to work with nonprofit organizations on social justice issues from climate justice to the racist impacts of the carceral state.
This year, Showcase is an event in which the audience can not only come together to support these wonderful students and their work, but also to envision a range of digital futures together.
All are welcome! RSVP with the QR Code found on the poster, we hope to see you there 🙂

Singh, A. (ECE) - Quantum Key Distribution Using Entangled Pairs with Random Grouping
2025-12-10 13:00 - 15:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) provides information-theoretic security for cryptographic key establishment, but existing protocols exhibit limited noise tolerance, restricting their applicability in practical quantum channels with finite resources. This work introduces a QKD protocol based on entanglement swapping that significantly enhances error tolerance and key generation rates. The protocol encodes six-bit classical symbols into six-qubit entangled states organized as three Bell pairs. Key contributions include: (1) maintaining positive secrecy rates under 100% intercept-resend attacks, unprecedented among existing protocols, (2) proven security against collective attacks up to 29.29% quantum bit error rate (QBER), substantially exceeding BB84’s 11% threshold, and (3) finite-key security analysis demonstrating viable key generation under practical block size constraints. These results establish that structured multi-qubit encoding fundamentally broadens the operational capabilities of quantum key distribution, enabling secure communication in high-noise environments such as free-space satellite links and urban channels where conventional protocols fail.
Host: Archana Jayprakash Singh, Ph.D. Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Zouheir Rezki
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/92875779810?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 530049

Research Lunch & Learn: Managing Conflicts of Interest and Commitment
2025-12-10 12:00 - 13:00 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96141024228?pwd=[REDACTED]
Join us for a discussion on Financial Conflicts of Interest (FCOI) and Conflicts of Commitment (COC) — what they are, why they matter, and how we manage them at UC Santa Cruz. This session will provide an overview of institutional processes for disclosing and reviewing potential conflicts, clarify the key differences between FCOI and COC, and explain how both are addressed in the context of federally funded research. Led by OR and APO experts, the speakers will also explore the broader implications of unmanaged conflicts on research integrity, public trust, and institutional accountability.

Speakers: Bri Quinn, Office of Research Compliance Administration; Karisa Breckenridge and Ibukun Bloom, Academic Personnel Office

Audience: UCSC researchers

Join Zoom Meeting: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96141024228?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 961 4102 4228Passcode: [REDACTED]

One tap mobile+16694449171,,96141024228#,,,,*[REDACTED]# US+16699006833,,96141024228#,,,,*[REDACTED]# US (San Jose)

Engineering Teaching Community (Faculty)
2025-12-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
During the chaos of a quarter, is it hard to find time to reflect and improve as an instructor? Would you like to be a part of an inclusive, supportive group of engineering instructors who do this in community? ETC is for sharing teaching experiences, classroom ideas, research on learning, and methods that support instructors and students. All are welcome, and lunch is provided. Please reach out to Jenny Quynn with questions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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]
