Events

College Night: 831 Night Market
2025-10-23 17:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell/Stevenson Dining Hall, 520 Cowell-Stevenson Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Cowell and Stevenson Colleges, in collaboration with UCSC Dining, present the first College Night of the year! Join us Thursday, October 23, from 5–8 p.m. at the Cowell/Stevenson Dining Hall for a night of activities, fun, community, and a special themed menu. Standard dining hall entry pricing applies, and all students, faculty, and staff are invited.
Please note: The dining hall will be closed from 2–5 p.m. for event preparation.
Learn more about College Nights at dining.ucsc.edu/events.
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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

Wiki-a-thon Supporting BIPOC Scientists
2025-10-23 14:00 - 17:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join us for an afternoon of creating and editing pages for BIPOC scientists, engineers, and technologists! Wikipedia overwhelmingly recognizes the achievements of white people. This wiki-a-thon works to reverse this trend, highlighting the often overlooked accomplishments of BIPOC leaders in science and technology, and ensuring that the next generation can see role models who look like them.
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY – RSVPs appreciated
We will provide a list of scientists who don’t yet have pages, or you can come up with your own! The event will begin with a short training on how to edit Wikipedia, followed by time to write your own article on a scientist, engineer, or technologist of your choice.
When: Thursday, October 23 from 2-5pm. Come for the whole time or just an hour or two!
Where: E2-506 and Zoom (RSVP for link)
Who: All students, faculty, and staff are welcome to attend!
Snacks and drinks will be provided!
Read more about our inspiration.

Robots that Know What They Do Not Know: Assured AI-enabled Autonomy in Unknown Environments
2025-10-23 14:00 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Speaker: Yiannis Kantaros, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Systems Engineering at WashU in St. Louis.
Title: Robots that Know What They Do Not Know: Assured AI-enabled Autonomy in Unknown Environments.
Time: Thursday, Oct 23rd, 2025, 2:00-3:00 pm.
Location: E2-553 or Zoom.
Abstract: Designing robots that navigate unfamiliar environments to execute natural language (NL) commands is a cornerstone of advanced embodied intelligence. While recent AI-enabled architectures have made impressive empirical progress, they often lack introspection, leading to systems that act with unwarranted confidence, unaware of their own limitations or whether they have successfully completed their tasks. As a result, these systems offer limited performance and safety guarantees, restricting their deployment in safety-critical settings.
In this talk, I will present an introspective, neuro-symbolic autonomy architecture that enables robots to complete NL tasks in unknown environments with assurance guarantees by explicitly quantifying their own uncertainty using uncertainty quantification (UQ) tools. The neural component employs large language models (LLMs) to translate NL commands into temporal logic specifications, while leveraging conformal prediction, a UQ tool, to calibrate and quantify prediction uncertainty arising from LLM imperfections and potential NL ambiguity. When uncertainty exceeds user-defined thresholds, uncertainty-aware feedback is solicited from auxiliary LLMs—or, if necessary, from human operators. We provide theoretical guarantees, supported by empirical case studies, that the proposed uncertainty-aware translation framework, called ConformalNL2LTL, achieves user-specified translation success rates under certain distributional settings. The symbolic component generates plans for mobile robots with AI-enabled perception systems to satisfy temporal logic tasks while explicitly reasoning over perceptual and environmental uncertainty. This allows robots to decide when to proceed confidently and when to actively gather additional sensor data, ensuring task completion with the desired probability. Notably, the developed planners are agnostic to specific sensor models or noise characteristics. The talk will conclude with case studies and demonstrations, followed by a discussion of limitations and open problems.
Speaker Bio: Yiannis Kantaros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), St. Louis, MO, USA. He earned a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2012 from the University of Patras, Greece, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University, Durham, NC, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Prior to joining WashU, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. His current research interests include machine learning, distributed control and optimization, and formal methods with applications in robotics. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2nd IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP) in 2014 and was a finalist for the Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2024 and a finalist for the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-physical Systems (CPSWeek-ICCPS) in 2025. He also received the 2017-18 Outstanding Dissertation Research Award from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University and a 2024 NSF CAREER Award.

Successful Slug Workshop: Campus Community & Student Success (on Zoom!)
2025-10-23 14:00 - 15:00
Campus Community & Student Success
Thursday, October 23, 2:05 p.m.– 2:50 p.m.
Location: Zoom
Learn how to get involved with the campus community and how it supports student success.
Successful Slug Workshop Series
Join Learning Support Services (LSS) for Successful Slug Workshops on Mondays at 11:40 a.m. and Wednesdays at 2:05 p.m.
These 45-minute workshops are open to all UCSC students and offer tools and strategies to support your academic success. Each session highlights best practices for effective, long-lasting learning and is led by LSS professional staff.
To get first priority, sign up on TutorHub or simply drop in. You can also sign up on TutorHub to receive email reminders.
Learn more and sign up: learningsupport.ucsc.edu/programs/workshops/

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.

Behavioral, Econometrics and Theory Seminar Series Presents: Kevin Chen
2025-10-23 13:40 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Economics Behavioral, Econometrics, & Theory Seminar
Date: Thursday, October 23, 2025
Time: 1:40-3:00 p.m.
Location: Engineering 2, Rm 499

Speaker: Kevin Chen
Title: Assistant Professor of Economics
Affiliation: Stanford University
Host: Michael Leung

Seminar title: Compound Selection Decisions: An Almost SURE Approach

ABSTRACT: This paper proposes methods for producing compound selection decisions in a Gaussian sequence model. Given unknown, fixed parameters µ_{1:n} and known σ_{1:n} with observations Yᵢ ∼ 𝒩(μᵢ, σᵢ²), the aim is to select a subset of units S to maximize utility Σ_{i∈S}(μᵢ − Kᵢ) for known costs Kᵢ. Inspired by Stein’s unbiased risk estimate (SURE), we introduce an almost unbiased estimator, ASSURE, for the expected utility of a proposed decision rule. ASSURE allows a user to choose a welfare-maximizing rule from a pre-specified class by optimizing the estimated welfare, thereby producing selection decisions that borrow strength across noisy estimates. We show that ASSURE yields decision rules that are asymptotically no worse than the optimal but infeasible rule in the pre-specified class. We apply ASSURE to p-value decision procedures in A/B testing, selecting Census tracts for economic opportunity, and identifying discriminating firms.

Road Trip! Light in the American West, from Baja to the Yukon
2025-10-23 12:00 - 17:00, 2025-10-22 12:00 - 17:00, 2025-10-21 12:00 - 17:00, 2025-10-20 12:00 - 17:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The photographs in this exhibition, made between 2004 and 2025, span across the American West from the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico to The Yukon territory in Canada. Paul Schoellhamer’s (Cowell ‘69) color photographs invite us to travel with him and reflect on our relationship to land, the light that shapes it, and the freedom – contested but essential – to move across it.
The exhibition draws on voices across time and perspective that frame the American landscape as more than a stage for beauty and awe. For Chief Satanta of the Kiowa Nation, to roam the land freely was life itself. For N. Scott Momaday, land must be “believed to be seen.” For Eliot Porter, light and reflection imparted magic to Glen Canyon’s waters. For Wallace Stegner, saving natural places meant saving fragments of our collective sanity. For Brook M. Thompson, the Klamath River is recognized with personhood. Alongside these perspectives, Paul’s images press us to see public land not as scenery to extract or aestheticize, but as sustenance and history. Land is alive and contested. To see closely is not to linger on a romanticized vision of the American landscape, but to reckon with responsibility: how we safeguard access, how we imagine “wildness,” and how we hold space for futures beyond our own. For Paul, this exhibition is a call for students to encounter land and light firsthand and let those encounters be their teachers.
Opening Reception
October 4, 2025
1-4pm
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Join us every Friday for Art Fridays.
No experience necessary. Supplies and snacks provided.

Sep 26 Snail Mail/Postcards
Oct 3 Souvenir Keychains
Oct 10 Stamp Magnets
Oct 17 Cyanotype Totebags/Pouches/Pencil cases
Oct 24 Candy Around The World Linocuts
Oct 31 Abstract Felt Collages
Nov 7 Phone Photos/Buttons
Nov 14 Travel Related Patches With Upcycled Materials
Nov 21 Thanksgiving Break! No Art Friday
Nov 28 Unexpected Landscape Surrealist Collage

Please note that the date and the project is subject to change.

A Conversation on Black Ecologies
2025-10-23 12:00 - 13:15 | Rachel Carson College, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the Sociology Department together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), The Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethic Studies in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to welcome speakers Tianna Bruno and Justin Hosbey (UC Berkeley) for a conversation on Black Ecologies.
Tianna Bruno is an Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley.
Justin Hosbey is an Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley.
Lindsey Dillon is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.
This event is part of a series co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) together with the Sociology Department, The Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Elevator Pitch Competition
2025-10-23 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
Are you ready to showcase your communication and persuasion skills? We’re excited to invite you to our Elevator Pitch Competition, where you’ll have the chance to:

Craft and practice concise, compelling, personal pitches that highlight your skills, experiences, and career aspirations – key for acing interviews!
Deliver a 60-second pitch that wows the judges.
Compete for amazing prizes, including gift cards, exclusive networking opportunities, & company swag.
Gain valuable feedback and insight into sales from industry professionals.

Prizes: $100 Amazon Gift Card and company swag!
This is your chance to show off your skills, connect with recruiters, and learn more about our exciting full-time sales opportunities!
Space is limited, so don’t miss out! If you have questions, feel free to reach out!
Snacks provided!
We can’t wait to see how you pitch!

We will provide captions for the presentation. If you have disability-related needs, please contact the Career Success office at csuccess@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-4420 as soon as possible.
YOU BELONG HERE
Programs and services are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities. To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

BME 280B Seminar: Computational Models of Biological Systems
2025-10-23 11:40 - 13:15 | Physical Sciences Building, Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Chen-Hsiang Yeang, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Statistical Science of Academia Sinica
Description: Computational models are roughly categorized into two types: describing the patterns of the phenomenon or data (description-driven models) and explaining the phenomenon or data with simpler, comprehensible rules (explanation-driven models). When building a model, the choice of the mixture ingredients of these two classes depends on the nature of the problem, availability of the knowledge and data of the underlying system. In this talk, I will give an overview of five models with varying combinations of descriptive and explanatory elements on different biological problems. First, I will introduce a joint model to capture irreversible and reversible drug resistance mechanisms of cancers and a dynamic treatment strategy to tackle drug resistance. Second, I will introduce a backward deconvolution algorithm based on probabilistic graphical models to unravel the cell type heterogeneity of the RNASeq data. Third, I will introduce a deep neural network model to integrate direct and indirect associations of genotypes and images with phenotypes. Fourth, I will introduce an experimental and computational framework to predict protein stability and discover motifs at C-terminals. Fifth, I will introduce three algorithms to demarcate independent holes of specified dimensions in large networks. These works illustrate how “model selection” should be tailored for specific biological problems.
Bio: Chen-Hsiang Yeang is currently an associate research fellow at the Institute of Statistical Science of Academia Sinica. His research interests focus on several areas in computational biology and data science: 1) cancer genomics, 2) cancer treatment, 3) molecular evolution, 4) network topology, and 5) machine learning.
Hosted by: Professor Josh Stuart, BME Department
Room: PSB-240

Innovations in Health Care Virtual Conference
2025-10-23 09:00 - 11:00, 2025-10-22 09:00 - 11:00, 2025-10-21 09:00 - 11:00 | CA
💫 Transform Healthcare with Us! 🧬🏥
🌟 5-Day Virtual Summit 2025: “Innovation, Ethics & the Next Frontier in Healthcare” 🌟
🗓️ Oct 20–24 | 9–11AM PST
💻 100% FREE | Live Online
Meet visionary leaders shaping the future of healthcare:
✨ Prof. Henry Greely
✨ Dr. James Giordano
✨ Lisa Berkley, PhD
✨ Alice Rathjen
✨ Christine Von Raesfeld
✨ Linda MacDonald Glenn, JD, LLM
🤝 Co-hosted by Krzysztof “Kris” Laudanski, President of @SHCI
Join the movement redefining innovation and ethics in modern medicine! 🌍💫
Register at https://www.linkedin.com/company/theshci/posts/
💡 #HealthTechRevolution #EthicalInnovation #FutureOfHealthcare #MedTech2025 #SHCI
🙌 Ready to be part of the change? Drop a comment below!

Global Cafe (Hosted by Global Engagement)
2025-10-22 14:00 - 16:00 | Classroom Unit, Classroom Unit, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, Select a Country:
Global Engagement invites you to join us for our monthly Global Cafe. Come swing by our office for some refreshments, meet new people, and share international stories with fellow students, staff, and faculty members.
No RSVP required. If you have any questions, please contact us at iprogramming@ucsc.edu

These Hands Heal: Growing, Planting, and Understanding
2025-10-22 13:00 - 16:00 | College 9 & John R. Lewis College Garden
As part of Relationship, Dating, and Domestic Violence Awareness/Action Month (RDDVAM), all UC Santa Cruz students, staff, and faculty are invited to plant seeds and paint messages of support for survivors—or reflections for themselves. Then, place these seeds and stones of resilience in your own gardens or shared green spaces for others to discover. Art supplies, snacks, and community provided — co-sponsored by College 9’s CoCurricular Programs Office.

Penumbra de la memoria: Brown Bag with Maya Scherr-Willson
2025-10-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Huerta Center Conference Room (Casa Latina), 641 Merrill Rd, Santa Cruz,, CA, 95064
During this presentation, Maya Scherr-Willson (PhD Student in the Film and Media Department) will show material and reflect on insights from a research trip that laid the groundwork for Penumbra de la memoria, a feature documentary to be shot this summer. The project reunites eight women fifty years after they were held as political prisoners together during Argentina’s last military dictatorship to film an adaptation from memory of their prison-era performance of The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca. The group, engaged in collective work, will be the protagonist of the film that chronicles the political memory that erupts through their creative process.

Enoughness in the Age of Comparison
2025-10-22 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
What does “enough” look like in your life—and who gets to decide? In a world that constantly pushes us to do, earn, and be more, this webinar invites you to pause and reflect. Join a panel of UC alumni and financial wellness experts for a meaningful conversation about redefining financial success—not as accumulation, but as alignment with your personal values. Discover practical strategies for building a life of sufficiency, intention, and peace of mind.
Hosted by UC Alumni Career Network, and open to UC alumni at all career stages.

CSE Colloquium - The C++11 Concurrency Memory Model: Remaining Challenges
2025-10-22 11:00 - 12:15 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Hans Boehm, Google
Abstract: C++11 extended the language to include threads, defining a concurrency memory model to specify the semantics of shared variables, including “atomic” variables that can be accessed without mutual exclusion. Although this followed Posix threads by more than a decade, and the revision of the Java memory model by a few years, it still helped to resolve some very fundamental points of confusion about the semantics and validity of compiler optimizations in multi-threaded programs. The C definition largely copied it, and several other programming languages and systems, as well as later versions of Java, built on it.
These shared variable semantics provide a clean solution for concurrent programming for which a small amount of extra synchronization-related overhead is acceptable. However, C++ programmers pride themselves in squeezing out the last bit of performance, even if it involves living on the edge. Although the C++ memory model attempts to address those cases, issues remain. In particular, so-called “relaxed” atomics do not have clean semantics, for reasons that appear more and more fundamental. And the discovery that well-motivated hardware characteristics are incompatible with the original model required complicating it. On the other hand, hardware improvements have greatly reduced the need for the now deprecated “memory_order_consume” facility.
We’ll start with an overview of the C++ memory model, and then outline some of the remaining challenges. We’ll give an example to illustrate why “memory_order_relaxed”, which attempts to just expose machine load and store instructions, is inherently much harder to define at the programming language level than it is at the hardware level.
Bio: Hans Boehm works primarily on concurrency issues in the Android platform. He was the initial chair of the ISO C++ Concurrency Study Group, where he led the addition of threads and associated concurrency semantics to the language. He occasionally gets sidetracked into other topics, including work on arithmetic in the Google Calculator app.

Hans is best known as the original primary author of bdwgc, a garbage collector for C. He has published extensively on memory management and concurrent programming. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is a former chair of ACM SIGPLAN, an ACM Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award.
Hosted by: Professor Mohsen Lesani
Location: Engineering 2, E2-180
*Refreshments such as coffee and pastries will be provided.
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

Drop-In Figure Drawing
2025-10-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Drop-In Draw provides a live model and room monitor. There is no formal lesson and only dry media is allowed (no paints).
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ADVISORIES
– These events contain mature content and nudity.
– Drop-In Draw is subject to the possibility of last-minute cancellation without notification, and sessions are not guaranteed.
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
– UCSC Art Department Room L-101
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SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
This series occurs weekly on Tuesday evenings during fall quarter, including the following:
– Tue., Sep. 30, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
– Tue., Oct. 7, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
– Tue., Oct. 14, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
– Tue., Oct. 21, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
– Tue., Oct. 28, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
– Tue., Nov. 4, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
– Tue., Nov. 18, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
– Tue., Nov. 25, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
Additional dates to be announced for winter and spring quarter.
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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.

Joshua McFadden, Six Seasons of Pasta
2025-10-21 19:00 - 20:00 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes James Beard Award-winning author Joshua McFadden for a discussion and signing of his highly anticipated new cookbook Six Seasons of Pasta. In his follow-up to Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables, McFadden teaches home cooks how to use storebought dried pasta to create seasonal, restaurant-quality dishes at home.
Get tickets

Yoga as Healing Series
2025-10-21 17:30 - 19:15 | Health Center (Student Health Center), 525 McLaughlin Drive, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Yoga as Healing is an offering for students at UC Santa Cruz who identify as survivors of interpersonal violence. Together, we will practice gentle body movement, breathwork, meditation, and more—all from a trauma-informed lens.
This 7-week program is limited to 8–10 participants in each cohort and is intended to provide a safe and predictable environment for survivors to build community.
At the beginning of each session, participants will have time to share their progress and personal experiences with the class. This will be followed by asana practice (physical postures), and the class will close with journaling, art, and reflection.
CARE will provide yoga mats, blocks, and a blanket for each participant. You are encouraged to wear comfortable clothing and bring a water bottle for hydration.
Participants are welcome to join Yoga as Healing for any of the sessions; attendance at the orientation is not required. The sessions run from October 7 through November 25, with no session on November 11.
This event is open to all UC Santa Cruz students. Fill out an interest form to sign up.

Western Regional Hub: Undergraduate Success Group Meeting
2025-10-21 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
Members of the hub’s working group focused on Undergraduate student success will meet to share ideas and strategize.
If you would like to be involved in the hub’s work, please contact Richard Raygoza at riraygoz@ucsc.edu

CITRIS Aviation Prize Information Session
2025-10-21 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
Join us for this virtual info session on the 2025–26 CITRIS Aviation Prize, an exciting multi-campus student competition inviting teams to design innovative solutions for the future of air mobility across the University of California.
The session will cover this year’s competition guidelines, key dates and requirements, and available resources. Attendees will also have the opportunity for Q&A with members of the CITRIS Aviation Leadership Committee, composed of aviation research faculty from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced, and UC Santa Cruz.
Register here to attend.
For any questions, contact aviationprize@citris-uc.org.

Date: Tuesday, October 21
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Zoom (register to attend).

Screening: Cracking the Code
2025-10-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Landmark’s Del Mar Theatre
Please join us for a public screening of “Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution” at the Landmark Theater on Monday, October 20. The screening will start at 7pm, with a panel discussion hosted by the UCSC RNA Center to follow.
This powerful new documentary chronicles Nobel Laureate Phil Sharp’s discovery of RNA splicing, a breakthrough that ignited the biotechnology revolution and continues to shape the future of medicine and innovation worldwide. Our city was chosen for a special screening of this film in recognition of UC Santa Cruz’s long-standing leadership in RNA research and its pivotal contributions to understanding RNA metabolism.
Register to attend
More than a film, this evening is an opportunity to reflect on Santa Cruz’s place in the future of biotechnology and life sciences innovation. After the screening, we will host a panel discussion themed “Why Not Santa Cruz?”—exploring how our region, with its scientific excellence in RNA and Genomics, entrepreneurial spirit, and vibrant community, might cultivate the next generation of discoveries, companies, and partnerships.
We expect a lively exchange among scientists, community leaders, philanthropists, and innovation builders about how Santa Cruz can play a greater role in shaping the next wave of biotech breakthroughs.
View trailer here

Statistics Seminar: Distance-to-set regularization for inference under constraints
2025-10-20 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Presenter: Jason Xu, Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics, UCLA
Description: We consider a penalty framework based on regularizing the squared distance to set-based constraints for several core statistical tasks. These distance-to-set penalties provide a simple and flexible way to cast constrained optimization problems in more tractable unconstrained forms. We will see that they often avoid drawbacks that arise from popular alternatives such as shrinkage methods. We discuss a general strategy for eliciting effective algorithms in this framework using majorization-minimization (MM), the general principle behind EM that transfers difficult problems onto a sequence of more manageable subproblems. We showcase new progress on classical problems including sparse covariance estimation using this approach, and discuss connections to Bayesian inference. In particular, analogous ideas lead to constraint relaxation and generalized profile likelihood to include optimization subproblems, leading to methods that are amenable to gradient-based posterior computation.
Bio: Jason Xu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of California Los Angeles. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, he was a faculty member in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University. Xu’s research program focuses on stochastic modeling and computational challenges in dynamic, dependent, and missing data settings, and he contributes tools at the interface of optimization and Bayesian approaches
Hosted by: Professor Paul Parker

AM Seminar: Sampling-Based Adaptive Rank Integrators for Multi-scale Kinetic Models.
2025-10-20 16:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Professor Jingmei Qiu, University of Delaware

Description: In this talk, we introduce a sampling-based semi-Lagrangian adaptive rank (SLAR) method, which leverages a cross approximation strategy—also known as CUR or pseudo-skeleton decomposition—to efficiently represent low-rank structures in kinetic solutions. The method dynamically adapts the rank of the solution while ensuring numerical stability through singular value truncation and mass-conservative projections. By combining the advantages of semi-Lagrangian integration with low-rank approximations, SLAR enables significantly larger time steps compared to conventional methods and is extended to nonlinear systems such as the Vlasov-Poisson equations using a Runge-Kutta exponential integrator. Building on this framework, we further develop the SLAR method for the multi-scale BGK equation, introducing an asymptotically accurate approach that eliminates the need for low-rank decompositions of the local Maxwellian in the collision operator. To enforce conservation of mass, momentum, and energy, we propose a novel locally macroscopic conservative (LoMaC) technique, which discretizes the macroscopic system using high-order DIRK methods. Additionally, a dynamic closure strategy is employed to self-consistently adjust macroscopic moments, enabling robust simulations across both kinetic and hydrodynamic regimes, even in the presence of shocks and discontinuities. We validate our method through extensive benchmark tests on linear advection, unto 3D3V nonlinear Vlasov-Poisson, and multi-scale kinetic problems, demonstrating its accuracy, stability, and computational efficiency. The Sampling-Based Adaptive Rank framework offers a promising pathway for overcoming the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional multi-scale kinetic problems.

Bio: Dr. Jingmei Qiu is a Unidel Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on the design, analysis, and application of high-order structure-preserving computational algorithms for complex systems characterized by multi-scale, multi-physics, and high-dimensional features. Dr. Qiu’s work includes developing low-rank tensor approximations for high-dimensional, time-dependent problems with structure preservation, as well as Eulerian-Lagrangian high-order numerical methods for fluid and kinetic applications.

Hosted by: Professor Julie Simons

CM Seminar - "Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code"
2025-10-20 12:30 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presented by: Daniel Temkin

Description: Software art is widely accepted, but can programming languages themselves be art? The new book Forty-Four Esolangs makes this argument, collecting work by a single artist who poses code as prayer to the Greek gods, patterns of empty folders, or typed in tandem by two programmers, the rhythm and synchrony of their typing determining commands. Temkin will share projects from the book in the context of thirty plus years of esolangs, showing the poetic possibilities of this medium.
Bio: Daniel Temkin makes photographic and computational art exploring logic and human irrationality. He began interviewing other esolangers and code artists in 2011, creating the blog esoteric.codes. ZKM exhibited the blog and commissioned videos of Temkin explaining esolang history for their Open Codes show in 2018–19. Esoteric.codes earned an ArtsWriters.org grant and a residency at New Museum’s NEW INC, the first museum-led cultural incubator. Temkin has written about esolangs for Hyperallergic and Leonardo, and his aesthetic theory of the form was published by Digital Humanities Quarterly. You can see his work at danieltemkin.com.
Hosted by: Professor Katherine Isbister
When: Monday, October 20 from 12:30PM to 1:30PM
Location:
IN-PERSON @ UCSC Main Campus, E2-280.
Viewing room @ SVC 3212.
LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED AT BOTH LOCATIONS! Faculty and students are highly encouraged to attend.

Zoom info:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94577724433?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 945 7772 4433
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Successful Slug Workshop: Time Management (on Zoom!)
2025-10-20 11:30 - 12:30
Time Management
Monday, October 20, 11:40 a.m.–12:25 p.m.
Location: Zoom
Learn the ways you can manage your time and avoid procrastination/burnout.
Successful Slug Workshop Series
Join Learning Support Services (LSS) for Successful Slug Workshops on Mondays at 11:40 a.m. and Wednesdays at 2:05 p.m.
These 45-minute workshops are open to all UCSC students and offer tools and strategies to support your academic success. Each session highlights best practices for effective, long-lasting learning and is led by LSS professional staff.
To get first priority, sign up on TutorHub or simply drop in. You can also sign up on TutorHub to receive email reminders.
Learn more and sign up: learningsupport.ucsc.edu/programs/workshops/

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.
