Presenter: Jaeyoung Lim, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Agile Robotics and Perception Lab at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of California, Berkeley Description: Monitoring large-scale environments is essential […]
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 […]
Presenter: Derek Hollenbeck, postdoctoral research scholar, University of California, Merced Description: Advances in drone-based environmental sensing, atmospheric modeling, and intelligent monitoring systems are creating new opportunities for addressing emerging challenges in food safety and agricultural resilience. This talk explores how methodologies originally developed for methane emission detection and quantification could be translated toward agricultural and […]
Presenter: Masood Parvania, Roger P. Webb Endowed Professor, University of Utah Description: Many communities across the world are experiencing more frequent and severe extreme weather disturbances such as wildfires, heatwaves, drought, storms, rising sea levels, and flooding, which not only pose threats to human health, and the environment but also affect the ability of […]
Presenter: Eve Laroche-Pinel, Postdoctoral Researcher, California State University, Fresno Description: Advances in remote sensing, drone platforms, and data analytics are enhancing the ability to monitor agricultural systems at fine spatial and temporal scales. This presentation will highlight applied research using multispectral and hyperspectral data from satellites, drones, aircraft, and ground platforms to assess crop water […]
The annual BE Student Project Showcase celebrates the innovative work and accomplishments of undergraduate engineers in capstone courses and research pathways.
Every year, tens of thousands of tons of plaster-based materials are used in restoration and conservation applications, many of which are derived from non-renewable sources and discarded at the end of their service life. Here, we introduce a biodegradable, bio-derived composite based on chitosan and calcium carbonate that is composed of simple, widely available constituents […]
Presenter: Hamid Jafarbiglu, Agricultural Technology Evaluator, Big Idea Ventures Description: California agriculture is increasingly adopting organic and regenerative production systems, creating a growing need for technologies capable of monitoring complex agricultural environments, assessing food safety risks, and supporting data-driven management decisions. Emerging tools such as drones, hyperspectral scanning, environmental sensors, and artificial intelligence provide new […]
Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is the workhorse measurement behind lithium-ion battery diagnostics, biosensing, and corrosion science — yet no integrated circuit has ever delivered the complete capability of a benchtop analyzer on a single die. This dissertation presents ISoC, the first universal Impedance Spectroscopy instrument-on-chip. Designed in SkyWater 130 nm CMOS process, ISoC supports all […]
This dissertation investigates how neuromorphic and brain-inspired principles can guide the design of efficient neural language architectures. It addresses two central limitations of modern Transformer-based language models: memory growth with context length and high computational cost from dense matrix multiplication. Through studies of spiking neural networks, linear-recurrent language models, hybrid attention architectures, MatMul-free models, and […]
Presenter: Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor, UC Santa Cruz Description: Recently, applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have far outpaced Moore’s law in chip development, thus creating an increasingly large gap between user demand and the supply that the semiconductor industry can deliver. In this talk, we will discuss the unique […]
Ion transfer as the movement of charged species across spaces and interfaces is the basis of signaling in nearly all biological systems. My research is grounded in the idea that precise control over ion transfer enables direct manipulation of biological function. Specifically, I focus on how ion transport can be engineered to regulate both collective […]
The electric grid is essential to modern society, and recent developments such as renewable energy sources (RESs), battery energy storage systems (ESSs), and microgrids (MGs) have necessitated novel computational methods for planning and operations. Machine learning offers a promising lever here, both as an accelerator for and proxy to traditional optimization-based problems. In this thesis, […]
In this thrilling competition, teams from UCSC’s Mechatronics course will pit their autonomous robots against each other in an epic Sluggers of the Lost Goal competition. Each robotic agent will navigate the field, and shoot ping pong balls to make the golden goal. The champions will compete in a wild head to head tournament, until one robot emerges victorious! The Public is welcome!
While the human brain learns continually, mastering new tasks without forgetting the old and adapting to unfamiliar ones from context alone, modern neural networks still lack both. To bridge the gap between biological adaptivity and modern AI, we have established foundational work on sparsity as a computational principle at three levels of neural computation, through […]
While large language models can match or exceed human performance, they do so with memory and energy costs orders of magnitude greater than biological cognition. We investigate sparsity as a brain-inspired computational principle to address both. We first establish a framework for evaluating small language model construction methods, using the next-token logit distribution as a […]
Presented by: Paolo Actis, Associate Professor of Bionanotechnology at the University of Leeds Description: “Physiological and pathological processes within the human body are controlled by complex cell-cell interactions within the context of a dynamic microenvironment. The ability to dynamically measure phenotypes (i.e. gene expression, protein activities, ion fluctuations, signalling) at the single cell level is key […]
The rapid electrification of transportation is creating new interdependencies between power and transportation systems, particularly during extreme events and disasters. As electric vehicle (EV) adoption increases, evacuation-related charging demand, infrastructure disruptions, and limited access to energy resources introduce challenges that conventional power system planning and operation frameworks were not designed to address. Wildfires provide a […]
Medical image representation has long been dominated by voxel-grid matrices. While their inherent structure and order work efficiently for various linear transformations and provide a seamless visualization method on monitors, they fail to preserve the topology of the scan and to encode sparse information in a memory-efficient way. The recent emergence of machine learning-based continuous coordinate-based […]