Artificial intelligence is transforming how we understand and solve the world’s most complex challenges—while at the same time causing new challenges and concerns. We invite you to join us for a special UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture showcasing the faculty whose groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence is transforming science, technology, and society. From advances in […]
Come get excited about Baskin Engineering Climate Week at our student pop-up! 🌎 Climate Week is a chance to explore how Baskin Engineering is addressing climate challenges through innovative research, teaching, and hands-on projects. Discover the events happening throughout the week and find ways to get involved! Swing by for FREE BE swag, coffee, cookies, […]
Join us for a Climate Tech & Sustainability Showcase, where students, faculty, climate and sustainability-focused companies, founders, and community organizations come together to share their work and ideas. The event […]
Ready to explore career pathways that matter? Attend our very special Careers in Climate Tech & Sustainability Panel—celebrating Baskin Engineering Climate Week—for an inside look at careers that will help build a sustainable future. Panelists representing different roles and organizations will share their career journeys and offer practical insights into working in climate tech. There […]
Join Baskin Engineering to explore the frontier of power engineering, where the rapid rise of electrification and digital infrastructure is creating an unprecedented demand for next-generation talent and a critical opportunity for sustainability. This networking event bridges the gap between the classroom and the field, offering students and faculty a front-row seat to the trends […]
This is a programming contest, but with a twist! Instead of scoring you based on your speed and solution accuracy, we score you based on your programming quality and solution accuracy. This means that instead of looking at how fast you can program a solution, we look at your number of compiles/runs instead.* The contestant that […]
Presented by: Edward Wang Description: “What does it actually look like to invent something? In this talk, I trace the decade-long journey of turning a smartphone into a blood pressure monitor, from Seismo, which used smartphone accelerometers to measure pulse transit time, to BPClip, a dollar clip that brought calibration-free oscillometry to the fingertip, to VibroBP, which […]
Complex societal problems (e.g. wicked problems) such as those brought on by climate change can be addressed through a combination of Research through Design (RtD), co-design, and Serious Games (SG) by inviting affected communities to take part in developing iterative, experimental solutions and exploring their potential impact. In the course of my research, I have […]
Presented by: Rabindra (Robby) Ratan Description: “Novel communication technologies have always presented challenges and opportunities in education. Since my days as a wee assistant professor of media and information, I have embraced this chaos. In 2015, I implemented avatar-based discussion forums into my classes to study the Proteus effect (i.e., the phenomenon of avatar characteristics influencing […]
Advances in microscopy have transformed our understanding of biological systems, yet the high cost and limited accessibility of commercial imaging platforms continue to re- strict their use in many research […]
The STEM Culture Festival is returning to UC Santa Cruz on Friday, May 15 from 1-4pm in the Baskin Engineering Courtyard. Join us! This year, we’re expanding with even more performances, activities, and creative ways to celebrate UCSC’s vibrant, diverse, and excellent STEM culture! What to expect: Cuban Dance Master Susana Arenas and her troupe […]
Welcome to the premier physical AI hackathon on the West Coast. We are bringing together the top 200 AI, infrastructure, and hardware engineers to build autonomous, agentic applications on the NVIDIA NemoClaw stack. You aren’t just calling APIs, you are building on enterprise-grade hardware. The Tracks: The Edge Track: 40 exclusive teams will be granted […]
Religion has historically been a profound force for global mobilization, shaping geopolitics, economies, and geography. Similarly, contemporary interactive media, with video games at the forefront, has moved beyond mere entertainment to become a powerful vehicle for communication, narrative, and inspiration, reaching millions worldwide. This dissertation investigates the intersection of these two influential forces: religion and […]
The annual BE Student Project Showcase celebrates the innovative work and accomplishments of undergraduate engineers in capstone courses and research pathways.
Health and wellness content creators play an important role in shaping how people receive and engage with health information on social media. Beyond delivering information, they also convey care, build trust, and sustain relationships with audiences. As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly integrated into creator work, existing research has examined AI disclosure, AI-mediated communication, and […]
Workplace concern reporting infrastructure, including human resources (HR) portals, grievance procedures, and whistleblower hotlines, is the formal channel through which employees in most organizations raise concerns about harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Yet existing research consistently finds that these systems fail the employees they are meant to protect: reports stall, concerns get filtered, retaliation occurs, and […]
Play is often seen as a form of entertainment, leisure, or childhood development. However, it also acts as a meaningful experience that shapes how people connect with others and interact with the world around them throughout their lives. Prior work on meaningful play and communities of play has mainly focused on individual experiences and participation, […]
Presented by: Alex Olwal Description: “In this talk, I will share my perspectives on the evolution and future of human-centered augmentation, through the lens of two decades of research and […]
Cooperative two-player play produces distinctive social experiences between players: intimacy, trust, cooperation, communitas. Since Huizinga, the frame within which these experiences arise has been called the Magic Circle: a temporarily-set-apart space through which play does its social work. It has been a central organizing concept across game studies, performance theory, and HCI because it points […]
Self-reflection holds significant potential for learning, behavior change, and emotional processing, yet designing technologies that effectively support it remains challenging, particularly when reflection involves difficult experiences such as failure. Most current technologies avoid negative experiences altogether, leaving users without support at precisely the moments when reflection could be most valuable. This dissertation investigates how technology […]