Author: Emily Cerf
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Stranger Things VR game co-written by UCSC’s Samantha Gorman launches in partnership with Netflix, Meta
A new virtual reality (VR) game set in the world of Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things launches today — and UC Santa Cruz Assistant Teaching Professor of Computational Media Samantha Gorman is a key creative mind behind it as the game’s co-writer and narrative director.
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Protein designer awarded $2.5M to develop bioluminescent protein for deep tissue imaging
Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Andy Yeh was awarded a nearly $2.5 million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to develop completely artificial enzymes that can produce bioluminescence in the body for deep tissue imaging.
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Widespread machine learning methods behind ‘link prediction’ are performing very poorly, study shows
New research from UC Santa Cruz Professor of Computer Science and Engineering C. “Sesh” Seshadhri published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences establishes that the metric used to measure link prediction performance is missing crucial information, and link prediction tasks are performing significantly worse than popular literature indicates.
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Bioelectronics enable precise control of organoids for better understanding of neuro diseases, neuron circuits
UC Santa Cruz researchers have developed a new plug-and-play bioelectronics system that enables researchers to precisely control neuronal activity in cortical organoids, which will help unlock new discoveries on how brains form neural circuits and the underpinnings of neurodevelopmental and degenerative diseases.
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Innovative PET technology will enable precise multitracer imaging of the brain
UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Shiva Abbaszadeh is developing technology that will enable precise multitracer positron emission tomography imaging of the human body’s most complex organ with the support of a $4 million NIH grant.
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Insights from UCSC-made COVID-19 tracking tool will guide the future of studying pathogens in real time
A new paper by a team of UCSC pathogen genomicists offers guidance for the future of web tools for tracking pathogen evolution.
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Nobuhiko Kobayashi elected to the 2023 National Academy of Inventors
Nobuhiko (Nobby) Kobayashi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
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Cloud technologies bring organoids into undergraduate classrooms for the first time
For the first time, remote education tools have allowed undergraduate students to gain direct experience experimenting with cortical organoids grown at UC Santa Cruz.
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Smart microgrids can restore power more efficiently and reliably in an outage
A new AI model that optimizes the use of renewables and other energy sources outperforms traditional power restoration techniques for islanded microgrids, a new paper from Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Yu Zhang shows.
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Brain-inspired AI code library passes major milestone, new paper offers perspective on future of field
UCSC Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jason Eshraghian’s open source code library for brain-inspired deep learning, called “snnTorch,” has surpassed 100,000 downloads and is used in a wide variety of projects. A new paper details the code and offers a perspective on the future of the field.

