• Zhu, R. (ECE) – From Neuromorphic Principles to Efficient Neural Language Architectures

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

    While Large Language Models exhibit remarkable capabilities, their reliance on the standard Transformer architecture imposes prohibitive computational costs and quadratic memory complexity. To bridge the gap between biological efficiency and high-performance AI, we have established foundational work in linearizing attention and maximizing hardware utilization through architectures such as RWKV and MatMul-Free networks. Addressing the remaining […]

  • 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 […]

  • CSE Colloquium: Making Systems Secure with Information Flow

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

    Presenter: Andrew Myers, Cornell University Abstract: Modern civilization depends on complex, interconnected software systems that must safeguard trustworthy or private data. We have ever-growing mountains of code yet lack principled ways to build large systems that are secure. What is missing is a way to securely build these systems compositionally: module by module and layer […]

    Free
  • Jamilan, S. (CSE) – Profile-guided Compiler Optimizations for Data Center Workloads

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

    Modern applications, such as data center workloads, have become increasingly complex. These applications primarily operate on massive datasets, which involve large memory footprints, irregular access patterns, and complex control and data flows. The processor-memory speed gap, combined with these complexities, can lead to unexpected performance inefficiencies in these applications, preventing them from achieving optimal performance. […]

  • Garg, S. (CSE) – MAPPING ANNOTATIONS FROM NETLIST TO SOURCE CODE

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

    Hardware design flows have become increasingly complex as modern chips integrate billions of transistors and rely on aggressive synthesis optimizations to meet performance, area, and power targets. While these transformations improve circuit efficiency, they also erase the correspondence between gate-level netlists and their originating HDL source lines. The loss of traceability makes post-synthesis debugging, timing […]

  • DeGrendele, C. (AM) – Learning-Augmented and Structure-Preserving Methods for Conservation Law Solvers

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

    In this work, we develop numerical methods for conservation laws that explore statistical, structure-preserving, and machine-learning-based approaches, each built on top of traditional numerical solvers. First, we develop a general Gaussian-process-based “recipe’’ for constructing high-order linear operators such as interpolation, reconstruction, and derivative approximations. Building on this recipe, we derive a kernel-agnostic convergence theory for […]

  • When Less is More: Applications of Type-Based Underapproximate Reasoning

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

    Presenter: Suresh Jagganathan, Purdue University Abstract: Unlike program verifiers, symbolic execution and property-based testing tools underapproximate program behavior: they aim to report only real bugs (no false positives), at the cost of potentially missing some (false negatives). Recent work has sought to place such tools on a more formal footing, primarily through the development of incorrectness […]

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  • Ramollari, H. (ECE) – An Optofluidic Spectrometer and Applications in Biosensing

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

    Miniaturized spectrometers have the potential to replace bulky and expensive benchtop models. We have previously demonstrated a multimode interference (MMI) waveguide-based spectrometer that achieves high performance while minimizing its footprint. In this talk, the integration of the MMI spectrometer into an optofluidic device is proposed. This integration opens up applications such as the detection of […]

  • Jorquera, Z. (CSE) – Quantum Entanglement Bounds and the Approximation Algorithms That Use Them

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

    One of the central challenges in quantum computing is finding or approximating the ground-state energy of a local Hamiltonian, a quantum analogue of classical constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Among these, the Quantum Max-Cut problem serves as a canonical example, paralleling the classical Max-Cut problem. Despite its foundational importance in both theoretical computer science and condensed […]

  • CSE Colloquium – Flux: Refinement Types for Verified Rust Systems

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

    Presenter: Ranjit Jhala, UCSD Abstract: Rust has risen as a language of choice for new systems code — from OS kernels to hypervisors, firmware and run-times — as it is memory safe and provides the sort of abstractions needed for efficient low-level systems implementation. We present Flux, a refinement type checker for Rust that shows how […]

    Free
  • CM Seminar: “Playful Design to Empower Climate Adaptation – What are we missing for real-life impact?”

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

    Presented by: Linda Hirsch   Description: “Games and playful interventions have been researched to increase awareness of climate change impacts and educate about mitigation and adaptation measures. However, besides increased awareness, what real-life impact and adapted behaviors can we actually observe from such interventions? In this talk, I will reflect on the differences between short-term […]

  • CSE Colloquium – Neurosymbolic AI: from research to industry

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

    Presenter: Luis Lamb, Catholic Institute of Technology Abstract: Neurosymbolic AI brings together the statistical nature of machine learning with the formal reasoning capabilities of symbolic AI. It seeks to offer a balanced approach to contemporary AI technologies, by combining the ability to learn from data, with the capacity to reason upon knowledge acquired from an environment. […]

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