• Moghadam, M. (CE) – Constraint-Aware Scene Understanding and Trajectory Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

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

    Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are commonly organized as modular pipelines that transform raw sensor measurements into low-level actuation commands through perception, planning, and control. While learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in perception and environment modeling, the planning layer remains a key bottleneck for reliable autonomy. Highway driving in particular requires long-horizon reasoning and socially […]

  • 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
  • ECE 290 Seminar: Dynamical Signatures: Harnessing the Hidden Language of In-Space Electric Propulsion

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

    Presenter: Dr. Christine Greve, Research Engineer,  Edwards AFB Description: Low-thrust space electric propulsion systems offer long propulsion system lifetimes for satellite maintenance maneuvers. These thrusters operate by generating and accelerating plasmas, making the thrusters throttleable, propellant-efficient, and scalable from low-to-high power operations. This talk will focus on efforts to leverage the underlying time-dependent dynamics of […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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
  • ECE 290 Seminar: Precision Nuclear Medicine: Engineering Solutions from Acquisition to Analysis

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

    Presenter: Spencer L. Bowen, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, UT Southwestern Medical Center Description: The Bowen Lab focuses on the development of tools for positron emission tomography (PET) and hybrid systems (e.g. PET/CT), to advance precision imaging for the care and study of oncology, neurology, and cardiology patients. Quantitative metrics […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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
  • 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 […]

  • ECE 290 Seminar: High-Frequency Circuits for Next-Generation Communication: From Beyond-5G mm-Wave MIMO to Co-Packaged Optics

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

    Presenter: Susnata Mondal, Research Scientist, Intel Description: Rapid growth in wireless connectivity, cloud computing, and AI infrastructure is driving an urgent need for communication systems that can deliver higher data rates with improved energy efficiency. Meeting these demands requires advances in high-frequency circuit design across both wireless and wireline domains, spanning millimeter-wave radios to optical […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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
  • Sambamurthy, A. (AM) – Lazy Diffusion: Resolving Spectral Collapse in Generative Models for Turbulence

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

    Diffusion-based generative models offer a principled framework for probabilistic forecasting, but we show they suffer from a fundamental spectral collapse when applied to turbulent flows. A Fourier-space analysis of the forward SDE reveals that the mode-wise signal-to-noise ratio decays monotonically in wavenumber for power-law spectra, rendering high-wavenumber content indistinguishable from noise. We reinterpret the noise […]

  • 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
  • CM Seminar – “The ‘Social’ Side of Social Virtual Reality”

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

    Presented by: Bree McEwan Description: One of the potential use cases of virtual reality is to create spaces where humans can interact with each other or virtual agents across distances. However, despite many of the technological challenges of social VR being solved, social VR does not see poised for widespread adoption. Multi-user social VR needs to […]

  • ECE Seminar: Integrated Micro- and Nanosystems for Biosensing, Neural Therapy, and Nanotoxicity

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

    Presenter: Dr. Ke Du, Associate Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Riverside Description: Miniaturized micro- and nanofluidic systems, integrated with biochemistry, microscopy, nanomaterials, and computer vision algorithms, provide powerful platforms for diverse biomedical applications, including molecular diagnostics, biophysics, and optogenetics. In this presentation, we introduce a pneumatically controlled nano-sieve device with nanolithography-defined […]

  • Johnstone, J. (AM) – The Effects of Asymmetry on Overshooting and Magnetic Pumping from Compressible Convection Zones

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

    We present a comprehensive numerical investigation examining how vertical asymmetry in compressible convection affects overshooting and the transport of large-scale magnetic fields from convective to stably stratified regions. Using three-dimensional direct numerical simulations, we systematically vary the superadiabaticity and stratification of a convective layer to control the vertical asymmetry of the flow and analyze its […]

  • ECE Seminar: Advanced Packaging as the Engine of the AI Systems Era

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

    Presenter: Tolga Acikalin, System and Package Architect, Lumilens Description: The rapid rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning—most notably recent breakthroughs in large language models—is reshaping the trajectory of the semiconductor industry and ushering in a new era of system innovation. As performance scaling at the device level slows, heterogeneous integration (HI) has emerged as […]

  • 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
  • CM Seminar – “Revealing Hidden Stories: Co-Designing the Thámien Ohlone Augmented Reality Tour”

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

    Presented by: Kai Lukoff Description: The Santa Clara University campus is adorned with symbols and monuments, including a Spanish Mission Church, that highlight its Catholic heritage. However, the presence and history of the Ohlone Native Americans, who have inhabited this land for thousands of years and continue to live in the region, receive little to […]