Are blockchains real? There’s a lot of excitement about blockchains and cryptocurrencies mixed with a lot of skepticism and pessimism. One thing is clear, the field instigated tremendous advances to the foundations of distributed systems and applied cryptography. This course will overview key advances in blockchains with a focus on the scientific foundations underpinning them.
This will cover the advanced topics in cryptography. Mathematical maturity is an absolute must. Strong background in discrete probability, linear algebra and undergraduate cryptography is required.
Once the quarter starts, instructor approval is required to maintain enrollment in the course, including if students do not have the listed pre-requisite courses completed.
This graduate-level course studies how formal reasoning techniques are used to design, analyze, and secure modern software systems operating in open, adversarial, and intelligent environments. Rather than focusing solely on individual verification tools, the course presents reasoning as a system-level activity that combines automated solvers, human-guided proofs, and AI-based agents.
This is a graduate-level research course on Transformer and Large Language Models. Over the duration of this course, we will delve into the latest publications within the expansive domain of Large Language Models (LLMs), intelligent agents, and multimodal learning. Each student is entrusted with the following responsibilities: Conducting critical analyses and authoring paper reviews, programming with LLMs, delivering comprehensive paper presentations, and undertaking a substantial, research-quality course project.
This course will be about the frontier LLM and agent capabilities, as well as their security issues and application to software security problems.
Prerequisites: Have basic knowledge about AI/ML (e.g., have taken CMPSC 165 A/B) and system security.
Once the quarter starts, instructor approval is required to maintain enrollment in the course, including if students do not have the listed pre-requisite courses completed.
Mixed and Augmented Reality, now often subsumed under the overarching term XR (eXtended Reality), has been an active research field since the 1990s. It has recently gained significant popularity because of the possibility of being implemented on smartphones, because of new emerging head-worn platforms (Meta Ray Ban Display and Quest, Apple "VisionPro", Snap Spectacles, MagicLeap, Microsoft Hololens,...), and because of its unique approach of offering context-based computing directly in a person's field of vision.
Foundation Models, which will introduce the recent advances in deep learning, especially about foundation models such as Transformers, LLMs, Multimodal LLMs, Diffusion, etc.
Once the quarter starts, instructor approval is required to maintain enrollment in the course, including if students do not have the listed pre-requisite courses completed.
There’s a lot of excitement about blockchains and cryptocurrencies mixed with a lot of skepticism and pessimism, but advances in the foundations underlying blockchains are undisputable. The goal of this course is to weave an overview of prominent blockchains systems with key technical advances the field has instigated.
This is a project-based course providing an introduction to game engines (specifically Godot’s Scenes, Nodes, Scripting, Signals, and Art Assets, and Animations) and foundational game design principles. Students will design and develop various 2D game genres and apply game design principles in their projects.
Prerequisites: Object-oriented programming knowledge covered in CMPSC 32 or CMPSC 9. Python knowledge is highly recommended.
This class is a hands-on class on vulnerability analysis that uses security exercises as a basis for education and training. Students will be required to solve medium-to-complex security problems during class. The problems require an understanding of operating system concepts, as well as the basics of computer security.
Course pre-requisities: CMPSC 170 and CMPSC 177. To request enrollment in the course, email cs-undergrad@ucsb.edu to verify the prerequisites.