UCSB Computer Science Department

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The Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara welcomes you.

Congratulations to Prabhanjan Ananth on his promotion to Associate Professor!
07/21/2025

Congratulations to Prabhanjan Ananth on his promotion to Associate Professor!

Mixed Reality (MR) technologies have seen rapid growth in recent years, driven by their ability to provide immersive, em...
07/08/2025

Mixed Reality (MR) technologies have seen rapid growth in recent years, driven by their ability to provide immersive, embodied experiences. However, the very features that make MR compelling also introduce novel challenges in security, privacy, and user safety. This talk surveys key problems rooted in three defining aspects of MR: privacy risks from expressive inputs (e.g., full-body tracking), perceptual attacks targeting human senses via convincing visuals, and online safety threats emerging from face-to-face social interactions. I will also highlight emerging techniques aimed at addressing these challenges.

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/7187140317

The widespread deployment of 5G promises multi-Gbps speeds, ultra-low latency, and massive capacity. According to the In...
07/01/2025

The widespread deployment of 5G promises multi-Gbps speeds, ultra-low latency, and massive capacity. According to the Internal Telecommunications Union, more than half of the world reports 5G coverage in 2024, and yet, field measurements often show 4G connectivity matching, or even beating, 5G, revealing that the technology’s potential is far from realized. From the user’s perspective, this gap stems from device hardware limitations, uneven spectrum and infrastructure deployments, and transient congestion.

Accurately mapping 5G coverage and quality is therefore essential for evidence-based policy and equitable investment. In this presentation, I will explore the current mobile broadband measurement landscape at the user edge, from crowdsourced speed tests to controlled drive tests, explaining the different metrics collected, their use in mapping mobile broadband coverage, along with their limitations.

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6962905139

Evaluating LLM-driven code security systems requires realistic and challenging test cases. This project introduces a nov...
07/01/2025

Evaluating LLM-driven code security systems requires realistic and challenging test cases. This project introduces a novel framework for generating targeted vulnerabilities in popular Java projects from the oss-fuzz repository to benchmark an LLM-based detection and patching system. We first establish a high-difficulty baseline with manually crafted, complex bugs. Then, we deploy an LLM agent that automates vulnerability generation. The agent analyzes project harnesses to identify reachable code, chooses a bug class and insertion point, and produces patches to inject Jazzer-detectable vulnerabilities. By creating a corpus of both human and autonomously-generated bugs, this work provides a challenging test suite for improving automated code defenses. It also establishes a step toward creating an adversarial testing loop - using one agent to systematically strengthen another - to advance early vulnerability detection.

06/25/2025

Graduating seniors in each undergraduate degree program in The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering select one Outstanding Faculty Award recipient every spring. The Outstanding Faculty for the Class of 2025 are Michael Gordon (UCSB Chemical Engineering), Yoga Isukapalli (UCSB Computer Engineering Program), Ziad Matni (UCSB Computer Science Department), Andrew Teel (UCSB Electrical and Computer Engineering Department), and Matthew Begley (UCSB Mechanical Engineering).👏

Click here to read more about the recipients: https://engineering.ucsb.edu/news/class-2025-recognizes-outstanding-faculty

The emergence of large, unstructured egocentric datasets such as Ego4D presents a unique opportunity to advance 3D indoo...
06/24/2025

The emergence of large, unstructured egocentric datasets such as Ego4D presents a unique opportunity to advance 3D indoor scene reconstruction, which has a strong application in Augmented Reality. However, these datasets pose several challenges: dynamic objects (e.g., humans) frequently occlude the scene and violate assumptions for Structure from Motion, and they often lack ground-truth for training. Meanwhile, synthetic egocentric generators like EgoGen provide thousands of fully labeled examples. However, the resulting synthetic-to-real domain gap prevents models trained on synthetic data from generalizing to real-world examples. In this work, we leverage PRISM, a semi-supervised learning framework, which allows us to train jointly on synthetic and real egocentric data. We focus specifically on monocular depth estimation in scenes with human occluders, and explore the impact on Multi View Stereo reconstruction.

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/5322629397

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. ...
06/24/2025

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their increasing size poses significant challenges for deployment on edge devices and personal computing platforms. My research aims to enhance the usability of small-scale language models by improving both their reliability and inference efficiency. In this proposal, I will first present my previous work on increasing the trustworthiness of language models through adversarial robustness, hallucination detection, and uncertainty quantification. I will also include my work on model compression for inference efficiency improvement. Building on this foundation, I will conclude future research plans to further advance the capability and efficiency of small language models through techniques such as knowledge distillation and reasoning in the latent space.

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6906662333

Congratulations to Shiyu Chang on his promotion to Associate Professor!
06/23/2025

Congratulations to Shiyu Chang on his promotion to Associate Professor!

Congratulations to Arpit Gupta on his promotion to Associate Professor!
06/23/2025

Congratulations to Arpit Gupta on his promotion to Associate Professor!

06/12/2025

The UCSB College of Engineering is excited to announce that we have been named The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering!👏

Mehrabian served as the fourth engineering dean at UCSB from 1983-1990. During his time at UCSB, he encouraged collaborations within the campus as well as partnerships with industry giants such as Bell Labs and IBM, and federal agencies. His work resulted in the establishment of the Department of Materials, an interdisciplinary department that is now one of the top-ranked in the nation, as well as an expansion of the college’s physical footprint with the completion of the Engineering II building complex.

“Dr. Mehrabian didn’t just build a college – he created a model for how engineering education should work,” said UCSB Dean of Engineering Umesh Mishra. “His vision of collaboration across departments laid the foundation for the top-tier national rankings our engineering programs enjoy today.”

Click here to read more: https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/021920/ucsbs-college-engineering-named-former-dean-robert-mehrabian

06/12/2025

Meet Will Corcoran, another Outstanding Senior, who will be graduating with highest honors and bachelor’s degree in computer science.🎓

Corcoran discovered his passion for research last year while participating in the department’s Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP) where he studied graph neural networks under the direction of computer science professor Ambuj Singh. This year, he worked with computer science professor Eric Vigoda to improve sampling for graph colorings with Markov chain Monte Carlo.

“Of everything that I’ve learned at UCSB, two things were the most important: how to learn and how to research. No material in a course has prepared me for the future nearly as well as those two skills,” said Corcoran, who will return to campus in the fall to pursue a master’s degree in computer science.💻

Congratulations, Will, we're so excited to see what you accomplish next!👏

Click here to read more: https://engineering.ucsb.edu/news/meet-outstanding-seniors-coes-class-2025
UCSB Computer Science Department

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Santa Barbara, CA

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Monday 9am - 12pm
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Tuesday 9am - 12pm
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Wednesday 9am - 12pm
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Thursday 9am - 12pm
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Friday 9am - 12pm
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(805) 893-4321

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