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UCSB Computer Science Department

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UCSB Computer Science Department

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

12/16/2025

🎄✨ Happy Holidays from the UCSB Computer Science family!
Wishing our students, alumni, colleagues, and community a joyful season filled with rest, connection, and curiosity. Thank you for being part of our journey—see you in the new year! 💙💛

12/15/2025

🚀 UCSB CS fam — we did that. 💻🔥

After two years deep in DARPA’s elite AIxCC competition, UCSB SecLab just got official recognition from OpenAI for a legit “proof of hacking” moment:
👉 10 BILLION tokens used. 🤯

Those tokens poweredthe creation of Artiphishell, which achieved the ranking of Top 5 Cyber Reasoning Systems in the WORLD 🌍🏆

For scale: that’s like running ~2,740 solid ChatGPT conversations every single day for two years. Yeah… that’s a lot of chatting! 😅

If you’re into AI, security, systems, or pushing CS to the edge, this is what UCSB looks like when it cooks. 👨‍💻👩‍💻🔥

💙💛

12/09/2025

🔐 CS Colloquium Alert!

Join us for Jingxuan He’s talk:

Security: A Next Frontier in AI Coding
📅 Wed, Dec 10, 2025
⏰ 3:30–4:30 PM
📍 HFH 1132
🎤 Host: Wenbo Guo

AI is transforming how we code—but what new security risks come with it? Jingxuan will share cutting-edge research on vulnerabilities in AI-generated code and new approaches to make it secure by design.

About the Speaker:
Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley; award-winning work at the intersection of security, AI, and programming languages.

🔗 More info: jxhe.info

11/24/2025

🌟 UCSB Crushed It! 🌟

We sent 5 amazing teams, and every single one delivered impressive results — placing 4th, 10th, 15th, 23rd, and 26th out of nearly 70 teams! They tackled problem sets like champs, solving 11, 10, 9, 6, and 5 problems, respectively. 💪🧠

🔥 Special shoutout to Team UCSB WA —
Ezra Furtado-Tiwari, Om Mahesh, and David Qiao — who placed 4th, solved the same number of problems as the winning team, and officially qualified for the National Contest! 🎉

They’re headed to the 2026 National Finals at the University of Central Florida College of Engineering & Computer Science in Orlando from March 19–22, 2026, where teams will compete for the chance to go to the World Finals. 🌍✨

Let’s give them a BIG congratulations and cheer them on as they prepare for the next stage! 💙🐚💻

11/04/2025

🎓 CS Colloquium @ UC Santa Barbara!

Join us for an inspiring talk by Dan Garcia from UC Berkeley:
🗣️ “A’s for All (as time and interest allow)”

🗓️ Friday, November 21
🕙 10:00 AM
📍 HFH 1132

Hosted by Maryam Majedi, don’t miss this chance to hear from one of the leading voices in computing education! 💡

10/31/2025

🎃🏆 It’s-a us… UCSB Computer Science!
We powered up and won the campus staff Halloween decorating contest with our Super Mario-themed department takeover! 🌈✨
From haunted castles to question blocks and Bowser’s lair, our team brought the Mushroom Kingdom to life—CS-style. 💻👻

10/16/2025

Do you love programming? Do you love problem solving? Do you love pizza?

If yes – participate in the UCSB ACM ICPC Local Contest (see https://cs.ucsb.edu/~daniello/icpc2025/ for more info.) You get 5 hours of fun problem solving with friends, free pizza, as well as the chance to be crowned UCSB Programming Champion. Top performing student teams will be invited to participate in the SoCal ICPC Regionals (November 15th at Riverside City College).

When?

Sunday October 19th, 10:30 AM to 16:30 PM

Where?

TBD — check https://cs.ucsb.edu/~daniello/icpc2025/ for updates

Who can participate?

Everyone (students, faculty, spouses, pets) is welcome to participate in the local contest! However, only teams consisting of ICPC-eligible students (essentially if you’re started in college in 2021 or later you’re ICPC-eligible. See https://icpc.global/regionals/rules for exact rules) can qualify to the regionals.

How to register and participate?

Step 1: Find teammates! Participation is in teams of up to 3 students. Teams of 2 and individual participants are very welcome, nevertheless we encourage people to team up in groups of 3 as that makes it more fun and likely increases your winning chances.

Step 2: Make user accounts at open.kattis.com for each of the participants on your team.

Step 3: Go to https://cs.ucsb.edu/~daniello/icpc2025/ and click on the registration link, here you will be prompted for team name, as well as names, emails, and Kattis usernames of all your team members. Make sure to (a) write correct Kattis usernames for everyone, and (b) only register each team once. Deadline to register is Friday October 17th at 3pm!
Step 4: Show up at the contest location at 9:30 on Sunday 12th with pen and paper and one laptop per team. See https://cs.ucsb.edu/~daniello/icpc2025/ for more info!

09/17/2025

Program analysis has produced a rich set of techniques for discovering, exercising, and demonstrating software bugs. These methods, however, often struggle to scale to the modern, complex, and stateful applications that underpin critical infrastructure. My research addresses this gap by advancing the techniques and practical applications of program analysis.

First, I will present how we extended symbolic ex*****on to operate effectively on complex targets such as operating system kernel drivers. In particular, I will describe our symbolic analysis framework POPKORN, which is capable of finding real-world vulnerabilities in Windows kernel drivers while addressing long-standing challenges such as path explosion and environment modeling. POPKORN has since been adopted and extended by the community to uncover more than 100 vulnerable Windows kernel drivers.

Next, I will describe our work on integrating large language models (LLMs) into program analysis workflows. As part of the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), we developed ARTIPHISHELL, a cyber reasoning system built on a distributed architecture of more than sixty cooperating components and AI agents. I will describe how ARTIPHISHELL combines traditional analyses with LLMs to improve the automated analysis of large open-source applications such as nginx, libxml2, and SQLite.

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/2267578965

09/10/2025

Foundation Models have achieved remarkable success across many domains, but the ever-growing model sizes and training token counts pose significant challenges in computation, memory, communication, and overall resource cost. Consequently, efficient pre-training has become a critical area of research. Recent efforts address efficiency from multiple angles. At the algorithmic level, innovations such as low-rank factorization, sparse attention, and bottleneck architectures reduce FLOPs and memory usage. At the system level, kernel-level optimizations improve raw throughput, while graph- and runtime-level techniques enhance scalability across large clusters. Increasingly, the intersection of these directions—algorithm–system co-design—is emerging as a promising path forward. This talk will provide an overview of research on efficient foundation model pre-training from both algorithmic and system perspectives. I will also outline my future work on scaling efficient model architectures while fully exploiting hardware capabilities to develop more scalable and resource-efficient training systems.

09/10/2025

Rust is a statically-compiled system programming language, created with an emphasis on memory safety. The Rust compiler can statically verify memory safety in many cases, but there exists memory safe code that cannot be verified by the compiler. For these cases developers can use the unsafe keyword to disable some of the compiler’s checks. As hand-written unsafe code can be prone to human error, programmers can use additional verification tools to ensure that the unsafe code satisfies the invariants of the Rust memory model. This talk will first discuss the required conditions for memory safety, how the scope of memory safety differs between different studies, and how the memory model compares to other system programming languages such as C or C++. Next, the talk will discuss the existing tools used for the static verification of Rust memory safety including symbolic ex*****on, SMT, and semi-automated proof assistant tools. Finally, dynamic verification methods will be discussed, including memory sanitizers and dynamic tracing tools. New methods for improving the performance of dynamic verification will be discussed. Both static and dynamic tools will be compared with respect to their soundness, completeness, and performance.

09/09/2025

Recent advances in fMRI-based visual reconstruction have enabled subject-agnostic approaches that leverage a shared, common representational space. In this talk, I will introduce innovative methods for efficiently mapping individual brain signals into this unified space. Building on these promising results, I will discuss future directions aimed at integrating additional neuroimaging modalities—specifically EEG and MEG—with fMRI data. Additionally, I will explore how human visual brain representations compare with the representational spaces of large language models, focusing on their geometrical properties. Finally, I will outline plans to validate these methods experimentally, with the goal of broadening their impact within cognitive neuroscience.

https://ucsb.zoom.us/my/christos.z

09/04/2025

Retrieval is a key component in enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with external information, improving accuracy, recency, and contextual richness. Yet many pipelines use the same retrieval and reranking strategy for every query, wasting computation on simple cases, introducing irrelevant content, and struggling with reasoning-intensive tasks. Recent work on efficient and adaptive retrievals dynamically adjusts how much computation is used, where it is applied, and how information is organized by deciding when and how to retrieve, tuning granularity, reusing caches, constructing contexts selectively, and focusing ranking on the most promising candidates, ultimately aligning retrieval with task complexity to enable scalable systems that handle diverse and complex information needs more effectively. My talk will provide an overview of the above work and my research direction.

https://ucsb.zoom.us/my/gyuwankim

Address

Harold Frank Hall
Santa Barbara, CA
93106

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Tuesday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Wednesday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Thursday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Friday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm

Telephone

(805) 893-4321

Website

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/

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