Computer Science and Engineering Department

The Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department housed within the Baskin School of Engineering spans multiple areas of research including theory, systems, AI/ML, architectures, and software. In cooperation with other departments on campus, CSE also offers a strong research group in bioinformatics, computational biology, biomolecular engineering, and human genome mapping. The CSE department enjoys a close relationship with the Electrical and Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics departments. Faculty members carry out joint research projects, supervise students, and teach courses for these departments.

Events from this organizer

Today

  • Ferdous, N. (CSE) – SPECSIM : A Simulation Infrastructure Mitigating Transient Timing Attacks

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

       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 […]

  • Wang, Y. (CSE) – Toward Practical and Effective Large Language Model Unlearning

    Virtual Event

    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 […]

  • Be Inspired: Explore Graduate Studies in STEM

    Not sure if graduate school is right for you? Join us to learn what graduate school is really about and explore whether it’s the right path for you. We’ll cover topics such as qualifying exams, funding options, common misconceptions, and more! Click the link below to register for the event: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_31OHhwc7QPqJ7nSyiuAUNg

  • CSE Colloquium – Constraining Chaos: Toward Faithful and Semantic Decoding in Language Models

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

    Presenter: Loris D’Antoni, UC San Diego Abstract: Language models excel at producing fluent text, but in domains like code and math, fluency isn’t enough — outputs must obey strict syntactic and semantic rules. A new wave of research is rethinking decoding itself: not as a process of sampling words, but as a negotiation between probability, structure, and […]

    Free

  • Sharma, R. (CSE) – Automatically Evolving GPU Libraries for Performance Portable AI Kernels

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

    GPUs are the workhorses of modern AI, widely deployed and developed by many vendors including Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. While these GPUs all offer high compute potential, programming them effectively is difficult because they differ in performance-critical features like SIMT width, cache capacity, and memory bandwidth, demanding different optimization strategies. Tunable kernels address […]

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    CSE Colloquium – Towards Relational Foundation Models: Zero-Shot Forecasting over Relational Databases

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

    Presenter: Charilaos I. Kanatsoulis, Stanford University Abstract: Foundation models have transformed unstructured domains such as language and vision, yet relational datasets, where most enterprise knowledge lives, still rely on brittle, task-specific ML pipelines. I will begin by introducing Relational Deep Learning (RDL), a general framework for learning directly from heterogeneous multi-table data, capturing structure across entities, attributes, […]

    Free

  • Yang, J. (CSE) – Towards Controllable and Compositional Generative Vision

    Virtual Event

    Diffusion-based text-to-image models can generate impressive images, but they largely treat an image as a single, flat output, which makes precise editing of individual elements difficult. This proposal studies layered generative representations that align with professional editing workflows, enabling users to manipulate foreground objects while preserving the rest of the scene. A central focus is […]

  • Li, X. (CSE) – Compute-Efficient Scaling of Fully-Open Visual Encoders

    Virtual Event

    Vision encoders have demonstrated significant performance gains in visual generation and multimodal reasoning. These improvements are primarily attributed to the scaling of data, model capacity, and compute. However, this progress is becoming less accessible due to a lack of transparency in data curation and training recipes. In combination with the high compute requirements of foundation-scale […]

  • CSE Colloquium: Incentivized Alignment for Strategic Agents (Human and Otherwise)

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

    Presenter: Grant Schoenebeck, University of Michigan Abstract: Advances in machine learning enable new forms of human-AI collaboration, but collaborative settings typically involve agents with divergent objectives and private information. This will become increasingly critical in the emerging world of agentic AI, where ML-powered agents act on behalf of individuals or institutions with conflicting goals. I use the […]

    Free
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    CSE Colloquium – Query Optimization: How to design a Meta-Algorithm that designs Algorithms?

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

    Presenter: Mahmoud Abo Khamis, RelationalAI Abstract: Database systems have evolved from simple bookkeeping tools to comprehensive data analytics platforms capable of learning from the data and making business decisions. As a result, database queries expanded in their expressive power and applications to include tensor computations, constraint satisfaction problems, graph analytics, scientific computing, SAT solving, among […]

    Free

  • Fredrickson, K. (CSE) – Practical Anonymity with Formal Resistance to Traffic Analysis

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

    Anonymous communication systems hide who is talking to whom, not just what is said. However, existing systems are either vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks–attacks where adversaries observe and correlate the network traffic of users–or are forced to rely on unrealistic and unenforceable assumptions about how users behave. Worse, existing theory lacks tools to rigorously model […]

  • Two students sit in the BE Courtyard and drink coffee

    Transform Your Future Pop-Up (Cookies Included!)

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

    Join Baskin Engineering to celebrate National Engineers Week with a sweet stop at the Transform Your Future Pop-Up (Cookies Included!) 🍪☕ This year’s Engineers Week theme, Transform Your Future, is a powerful reminder that engineering doesn’t just shape our world—it shapes our opportunities, our communities, and the futures we can imagine for ourselves. Swing by […]

  • Neta Haiby

    AI and Security 101

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

    Join us for an informative conversation with Neta Haiby, Head of Product | AI Security at Microsoft! Artificial Intelligence is transforming both cyber defense and cyber offense. It creates unique risks in how we build, deploy, and operate AI apps and Agents. This session examines how AI can be attacked or misused – through techniques […]

  • Liu, C. (CSE) – Enabling LLM Unlearning at Inference Time by Decomposing Detection and Intervention

    Virtual Event

    Machine unlearning addresses the “right to be forgotten” under GDPR and enables privacy, copyright, and safety compliance in large language models. Training-based unlearning can remove targeted behavior on benchmarks, but it scales poorly, can degrade utility, and can fail under adversarial prompting that recovers supposedly forgotten content. This prospectus proposes inference-time behavioral unlearning: rather than […]

  • CSE Colloquium: Agile and evolvable software construction in the era of rapidly evolving hardware accelerator designs

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

    Presenter Charith Mendis, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract Modern AI workloads have become exceedingly abundant and important in the current computing landscape. As a result, there have been numerous software and hardware innovations aimed at accelerating these workloads. However, we observe a subtle disconnect between the software […]

    Free
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    Exploring Research Pathways at Baskin Engineering

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

    Curious how being part of a research lab can supercharge your experience as a Baskin Engineer?   Join us for this informative event to learn about opportunities to solve open-ended problems, build deeper technical skills, and learn how to think like an engineer. We’ll kick things off with a quick overview of the kinds of research […]

  • Rocket Team in Slugworks

    BE Club Bash – Engineers Week

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

    Discover innovation at the Baskin Engineering Club Bash, an event celebrating National Engineers Week! Mark your calendars for Thursday, February 26, 12–2 PM in the BE Courtyard! The BE Club Bash brings together student organizations across all engineering disciplines to showcase their projects, demos, and interactive activities. Stop by to: Explore hands-on booths and demonstrations from student organizations Learn about engineering opportunities on […]

  • Semiconductor Career Summit – From Campus to Silicon Valley

    Stevenson Event Center Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    A SEMI Professional Development Seminar organized by the SEMI Silicon Valley Chapter – Connecting College Students to the Semiconductor Industry. Learn about career opportunities in high tech and acquire valuable, practical information that will help you choose career directions and plan for your success.

  • 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

  • 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 […]