UCSB Computer Science Department

Big news in quantum research! 🔬⚛️

As part of a multi-institutional team, CS Assistant Professor Murphy Niu has received a $2 Million DARPA Grant for advancing next-generation quantum systems.

💡 UCSB’s team of researchers are contributing to cross-platform error correction for scalable quantum computing and communication—critical for making hybrid quantum systems work reliably.

We are proud to see our community pushing the boundaries of quantum computing! 💙💛

Big congratulations to our 2026 Academic Senate award recipients! 🎉

🏆 Rich Wolski – Outstanding Graduate Mentor
🏆 Frederic Gibou – Distinguished Teaching
🏆 Ziad Matni – Distinguished Teaching
🏆 Junrui Liu – Outstanding Teaching Assistant

We’re proud to celebrate their impact on teaching, mentorship, and student success at UCSB CS 💙💛

Proud to have students who build things that actually matter.💡

This past March, 40 UCSB CS students presented real solutions to real problems at our annual Capstone Day—from an AI system cutting medical referral wait times from days to under an hour, a smartwatch app helping stroke survivors rehab at home, a hospital tool that intercepts dangerous recalls before they reach patients, and more.

Judges from Google, Salesforce, and Amazon called it the best day of their year! We’re inclined to agree!

Congrats to this year’s Capstone cohort on your incredible work! 💙💛

Quantum computing is still years away from threatening blockchain security. The work to prepare for it has to start now.
That’s the headline from the Coinbase Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain, which released its first position paper today. Professor Malkhi, who heads our Foundations of Financial Technology lab (https://fiftech.cs.ucsb.edu), represents UCSB on the board alongside researchers from Stanford, UT Austin, Bar-Ilan, the Ethereum Foundation, and Eigen Labs. 🔐
Proud to have this work coming out of UCSB CS.
💙💛
PostQuantum Fintech Research GradSchool STEM TechResearch Crypto

Proud to share that Yuheng Bu has received an NSF CAREER Award for foundational research on LLM watermarking. 🏆

What if AI-generated text could carry a reliable, traceable signal? Not just a yes/no flag, but a full attribution pointing to a specific model, system, or authorized use?

That’s the problem Yuheng is solving. Rigorous guarantees. Robust spoofing. Text quality preserved. 💡

The NSF CAREER Award is the most prestigious early-career recognition in the foundation’s portfolio, and we could not be more proud. 💙💛

Full article: https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/happenings/announcement/yuheng-bu-receives-nsf-career-award-research-llm-watermarking

CS research making real-world impact 💻🌍

Congrats to Associate Professor Arpit Gupta on being named a UC Presidential Faculty Fellow! 🎉

As part of his 2026 fellowship, he’ll be heading to Washington, D.C. to help shape how the $42B federal broadband program reaches underserved communities. His team’s research on broadband access has already influenced state legislation, regulatory discussions, and even a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief.

We congratulate Professor Gupta on this fellowship and can’t wait to see the impact his work will bring! 💙💛

Read more: https://cs.ucsb.edu/happenings/announcement/arpit-gupta-selected-uc-presidential-faculty-fellows-program

3 UCSB students are heading to the ICPC North America Championship this month after placing 4th out of 75 teams at the Southern California Regional of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) — congrats to the team! 👏

• Ezra Furtado-Tiwari ’28 (CCS Computing; Mathematics)
• Om Mahesh ’28 (CCS Mathematics; CoE Computer Science)
• David Qiao ’26 (CoE Computer Science; L&S Mathematics)

The North America Championship takes place March 19-22, 2026. We wish Ezra, Om, and David best of luck as they represent on the national stage! 💻

Special thanks to for supporting these students.

Full story: https://ccs.ucsb.edu/news/2026/ccs-students-help-lead-ucsb-team-icpc-nationals

CS Capstone 2026 is here—where digital intelligence meets the real world!

Come see the full-stack intelligent systems our student teams have engineered for real-world deployment beyond the lab—spanning cyber security, storytelling, visual systems, and more. 🌎

📍 UCSB Henley Hall
📅 Wednesday, March 11
⏰ 2:00–6:00 PM (Presentations + Posters w/ Snacks)

Come celebrate our students’ work. We’d love to see you there! ✨

What if AI agents could improve themselves without increasing deployment cost?

CS faculty Xin Eric Wang and researcher Zhaotian Weng were recently featured in for their work on Group-Evolving Agents (GEA)—a new framework that helps AI systems adapt and improve collectively, without requiring constant human intervention.

In rigorous benchmarks, GEA substantially outperformed prior self-evolving approaches and matched leading human-designed frameworks, all while maintaining standard inference costs at deployment.

We are proud to see this work recognized and progress toward a more resilient, self-improving AI systems.

Read more:
https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/new-agent-framework-matches-human-engineered-ai-systems-and-adds-zero