Baskin School of Engineering

The Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz is unique among public engineering schools. By offering future-looking programs of study and opportunities to engage in collaborative research across campus and with industry partners in Santa Cruz and nearby Silicon Valley, Baskin Engineering is a school of engineering for the 21st century. Founded in 1997, in the age of the internet, the Baskin Engineering community is deeply committed to addressing the most important engineering challenges posed by our modern world. Faculty and students pursue novel, visionary research guided by a mission to create positive societal impact.

Events from this organizer

Today

  • CSE Colloquium – Improving Efficiency and Reliability of Foundation Models in Clinical AI

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Vasiliki “Vicky” Bikia, PhD, Stanford Department of Biomedical Data Science and Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) Abstract: Deploying foundation models in health requires both computational efficiency and reliable generation. In this talk, I present two studies that address these dimensions separately but with a shared goal of real-world clinical deployment. The first study focuses on […]

    Free

  • Shields, S. (CM) – Procedural, Player-Centric Game Balancing

    Merrill College College Office, Santa Cruz, CA
    Hybrid Event

    Game balance is a term widely used among players, researchers, and designers of games. It is a concept that feels vitally important to how we make and play games – but when we try to define it or implement it, we seldom get the same definition twice. Balance appears differently to whoever is judging it, […]

  • The UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series presents: Unmasking cancer’s complete genetic code

    The UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series
    Silicon Valley Campus 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, United States

    In this Kraw lecture, Angela Brooks will discuss her work on cancer research. Current cancer research focuses almost entirely on finding errors—mutations—in DNA. This has given us incredible tools like precision oncology, matching patients with targeted drugs. But cancer cells almost always develop drug resistance, causing treatments to fail and limiting patient survival. An often-overlooked […]

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    BME 280B Seminar: Artificial intelligence systems to advance engineered T cell immunotherapy designs

    Biomedical Sciences Biomedical Sciences Building Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Zinaida Good, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology and the Division of Computational Medicine, Stanford University Description: T cell immunotherapies have reshaped the treatment landscape for hematologic malignancies and are rapidly extending to solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, and transplant tolerance. Yet durable benefit remains inconsistent, and toxicities remain clinically […]

  • Xu, Y. (CSE) – Right Place, Right Time: Accelerating Edge Computation on Modern Heterogeneous SoCs

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA
    Hybrid Event

    Modern edge computing increasingly relies on heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. These chips tightly integrate general-purpose CPUs with various specialized accelerators, including GPUs, FPGAs, and AI accelerators, all under a shared memory architecture. Although these shared-memory SoCs enable more efficient communication and data sharing between different processing units, they are notoriously difficult to program and tune […]

  • Hendawy, M. (CM) – Autonoming Child Online Safety in the Age of AI: From Control to Digital Co-Agency Across Cultures

    Virtual Event

    Children’s lives are now inextricably linked with AI-driven digital systems that shape learning, social interaction, and development. This has elevated child online safety to a central concern for families, policymakers, and educators. This makes Child online safety a wicked socio-technical problem, emerging from the complex interplay of social norms, platform incentives, cultural expectations, and rapidly […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data

    Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data

    Presenter: Amanda Coston, Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley Description: Performance evaluation plays a central role in decisions about whether and how predictive algorithms should be deployed in high-stakes settings. Yet, in many real-world domains, evaluation is fundamentally difficult: the data available for assessment are often biased, incomplete, or noisy, and the act of deploying […]

  • Robbins, A. (ECE) – How to train your organoid: goal-directed learning in biological neural networks

    Hybrid Event

    Artificial neural networks can now learn to play games, control robots, generate language, and solve complicated reasoning tasks, yet we still lack a clear understanding of how to directly guide learning in biological neural networks. We show that brain organoids can learn to solve a fundamental control task, balancing an inverted pendulum, through closed-loop electrophysiology. […]

  • Harrison, D. (CS) – Multi-Level Control in Neural Dialogue Generation: Style, Semantics, and Selection through Over-Generation and Ranking

    End-to-end neural generation models have largely displaced the modular architectures that once gave dialogue system designers explicit control over what is said and how it is said. While these models produce fluent text, they collapse content planning, sentence planning, and surface realization into a single undifferentiated decoding step, sacrificing the controllable structure that earlier systems […]

  • AM Seminar: Solution Discovery in Fluids with High Precision Using Neural Networks

    Presenter: Ching-Yao Lai, Assistant Professor, Stanford University Description: I will discuss examples utilizing neural networks (NNs) to find solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) that facilitate new discoveries. Despite being deemed universal function approximators, neural networks, in practice, struggle to fit functions with sufficient accuracy for rigorous analysis. Here, we developed multi-stage neural networks (Wang […]

  • Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data

    Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data

    Presenter: Amanda Coston, Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley Description: Performance evaluation plays a central role in decisions about whether and how predictive algorithms should be deployed in high-stakes settings. Yet, in many real-world domains, evaluation is fundamentally difficult: the data available for assessment are often biased, incomplete, or noisy, and the act of deploying […]

  • Mashhadi, N. (CSE) – Compositional, Clinically Conditioned, and Confound-Aware Deep Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging

    Virtual Event

    Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of dementia. Neuroimaging and clinical biomarkers can reveal early disease changes, but building reliable machine learning models is difficult because data come from different scanners and sites, some modalities are missing, labeled cohorts are limited, and factors such as age and scanner/site effects […]

  • CSE Colloquium: Co-Active AI-Assisted Programming

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Nadia Polikarpova, UCSD Abstract: AI-assisted programming has rapidly moved from novelty to default. Today, most developers use AI coding tools, and increasingly rely on agentic systems capable of making multi-step design and implementation decisions with minimal human guidance. While these systems boost productivity, they also introduce new risks: developers may disengage from the reasoning behind […]

    Free

  • BME 280B Seminar: Modulating Insulin Receptor Through New Ligands

    Physical Sciences Building Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA

    Presenter: Danny Chou, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Stanford University Description: Since its discovery in 1921, insulin has been at the forefront of scientific breakthroughs. From its amino acid sequencing to the revelation of its three‐dimensional structure, the progress in insulin research has spurred significant therapeutic breakthroughs. In recent years, protein engineering has introduced innovative chemical […]

  • Fan, Y. (CSE) – Building Human-Centered Multimodal AI Agents

    Virtual Event

    As multimodal artificial intelligence systems become increasingly embedded in everyday technology, there is a growing need to design human-centered AI agents that support and amplify human capabilities rather than replace them. This dissertation investigates how to build human-centered multimodal AI agents, framing human-centeredness as an agent-level objective that requires both accessible, assistive interaction and reliable, […]

  • Wang, H. (CSE) – Accelerating RTL Simulation with Specialized Graph Partitioners

    Jack Baskin Engineering Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

    Register transfer level (RTL) simulation is an invaluable tool for developing, debugging, verifying, and validating hardware designs. However, the performance of RTL simulation has long been a limiting factor in industry. Despite the inherent parallelism of hardware, current RTL simulators have not achieved practical performance gains due to fundamental challenges in communication, synchronization, memory bandwidth, […]

  • Teng, Z. (CM) – Visualizing Player Processes: Towards Design Guidelines for Interactive Process Visualization Tools in Game Analytics

    Virtual Event

    Game analysts face a significant challenge in understanding problem-solving and decision-making processes from the vast and complex sequential data generated by modern video games. Existing visualization tools often fail to adequately support the exploration, suffering from issues of visual clutter, inflexible cohort construction, and a lack of interactive depth. To address this gap, this dissertation […]

  • AM Seminar: The Thinking Eye: AI That Sees, Reads, and Reasons in Medicine

    Presenter: Yuyin Zhou, Assistant Professor, UCSC Description: Medical AI is undergoing a profound transformation, evolving from simple pattern recognition to systems capable of complex clinical reasoning. This talk will chart this evolution across three dimensions: data, models, and evaluation. I will first highlight the shift from limited, unimodal datasets to massive multimodal resources. In particular, […]