• 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 […]

  • ECE Seminar: Tactile sensing: At the boundary between mechanical and computational intelligence in robotic grippers

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

    Presenter: Dr. Hannah Stuart, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley Description: Robot grippers typically include mechanical intelligence (e.g., underactuation, compliance) or computational intelligence (e.g., fully actuated with a wide array of sensors). Next generation grippers and hands will require both intelligences to work in concert across applications with […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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
  • 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 […]

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