This award reflects Guillermo's dedication and rigor throughout his PhD, as well as the impact of his research. Well-deserved recognition for years of hard work! Thesis supervised by Pere Barlet Ros and Alberto Cabellos Aparicio.🎓
UCSB Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
@ucsbece.bsky.social
Official account of UC Santa Barbara's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
This is one of the university's highest distinctions for doctoral theses, recognizing outstanding scientific and technical contributions.📓
🎉Congratulations to Guillermo Bernárdez Gil! Thrilled to share that our postdoc, Guille, has been awarded the 2026 Extraordinary Doctoral Award by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Congrats, Guille, so proud to have you on our team👏 🔗https://tinyurl.com/43hbr9t3
🏆Congrats to Prof. Pradeep Sen and former PhD student Nima Kalantari who were just awarded the SIGGRAPH Test-of-Time Award for their 2015 paper that transformed computer graphics rendering! Read more here👇 tinyurl.com/mvh569zx @ucsbengineering.bsky.social @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social
Read more: www.nature.com/articles/s42... @geometric-intel.bsky.social @neurreps.bsky.social @ai-ucsb.bsky.social @ucsbece.bsky.social @ucsbengineering.bsky.social
A unifying framework from neural superposition to sparse interpretable codes - Nature Machine Intelligence
Kindt et al. present a unifying framework for superposition in neural networks. Their three-step approach clarifies how latent features can be identified, disentangled and assessed.
nature.com
The concept of superposition has motivated over three decades of work across different communities. It states that neural networks encode features by overlaying multiple concepts ('elephant', 'ball', 'pink') linearly within the same set of neurons. We ask: how can we recover these concepts?
Our review on superposition in AI & brains is published in @nature.com #Machine #Intelligence 🌐 Neural networks encode concepts in superposition. We can recover them in 3 steps: identifiability, compressed sensing, interpretability. W/ @david-klindt.bsky.social O'Neil Reizinger & Maurer 🌟
🔵⚡Big feature in @cnn.com this week on our very own Prof. Shuji Nakamura (Materials & ECE). The man who lit up the world with blue LEDs, and now wants to power it too. 🔗https://tinyurl.com/msm4h9bf @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social @ucsbengineering.bsky.social
🎉 Congratulations to @fatihdinc.bsky.social, postdoc in UC Santa Barbara #ECE and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, on winning the Richard C. DiPrima Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). 🏆 🔗 Read the full story: lnkd.in/gd27SUAA
Could there be a universal geometry of intelligence? @ninamiolane.bsky.social proposes answers in her Long Now Talk with @berggruen.org's Claire Isabel Webb.
🧠 Can geometry give us a theory of neural computation? Claire Isabel Webb and I discussed how #geometry, the hidden shapes & structure inside high-dimensional neural data, can be a powerful tool to understand how the brain computes. @longnow.org @geometric-intel.bsky.social @ucsbece.bsky.social
Could there be a universal geometry of intelligence? @ninamiolane.bsky.social proposes answers in her Long Now Talk with @berggruen.org's Claire Isabel Webb.
🎓After 38 years, Professor Forrest Brewer is retiring from UCSB ECE. His work in asynchronous logic, VLSI design, and sigma-delta computation has left a deep mark on this department and on the students he mentored along the way. We are grateful for every one of those 38 years.🙏
🏆Congratulations to Prof. Elaheh Ahmadi, recipient of the 2026 Young Investigator MBE Award from the International MBE Advisory Committee! Her research on novel ultra wide bandgap devices is pushing the boundaries of high power, high frequency, and quantum applications.🔬⚡
The ocean is inherently chaotic, yet existing data-driven ocean models produce deterministic forecasts. In our new preprint, we introduce Njord, a probabilistic graph neural network for ensemble ocean forecasting. Link: arxiv.org/abs/2605.15470 A couple highlights below 🧵
@ucsantabarbara.bsky.social is ranked #3 academic institution in the world for automation and control by the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities 🏆 At the heart of this success is the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation! Discover 👉 www.ccdc.ucsb.edu
FTP hasn't changed much since the 1990s. But the client software has gotten absurdly bloated. Even in the early 2000s a fully functional GUI-based FTP client was ~ 1 MB. Fit on a single 3.5" disk. I just downloaded a client that was 173 MB. For an FTP client. That's all it does.
🏆 Congratulations to ECE Professor and Aeluma CEO Dr. Jonathan Klamkin on receiving the prestigious IPRM Award from Compound Semiconductor Week! Read more here👇 tinyurl.com/apx9phhc @ucsbengineering.bsky.social @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social
🏥Congratulations to ECE Prof. Ramtin Pedarsani's team on receiving a UC Noyce Initiative award to develop robust vision-language models for clinical applications — part of a $3.4M UC-wide research push for computational health and cybersecurity.🤖 🔗https://tinyurl.com/mm9jb8x
🔬How do you study thousands of neurons at once? You build better tools. ECE Prof. Spencer Smith's SLAB Lab designed a scan angle multiplier that achieves the laser scanning trifecta: high speed, high resolution, and a larger area.🧠⚡ 📜https://tinyurl.com/36j7pa3d
🎉Congrats to ECE undergraduate Roland Yin on receiving the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship — one of the most prestigious honors in STEM!🏆 @ucsbengineering.bsky.social @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social 🔗https://tinyurl.com/63h5hvfz
🎉 Congratulations to ECE Professor James Buckwalter on being inducted as a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors!🏆 @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social @ucsbengineering.bsky.social 🔗 tinyurl.com/ubk93ahf
#UCSB's first fully online master's degree is here 💻 Coming to The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering in fall 2027, the new Master of Engineering and Technology Leadership program offers an interdisciplinary curriculum designed for working professionals. Full story: https://ow.ly/Bkls50YZ1B4
College of Engineering launches UCSB’s first fully online master’s degree program
The fully online format is structured so that students can continue to work while earning a UCSB engineering degree, regardless of geographic location or time zone.
ow.ly
The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering is launching METL — the Master of Engineering & Technology Leadership — the first fully online master's degree at UC Santa Barbara, built for working tech professionals around the world 🎓 @ucsbengineering.bsky.social @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social
Big news from our department! 🚀 Prof. Daniel Blumenthal and his group, in collaboration with @UMassAmherst, have demonstrated a chip-scale stabilized laser for trapped-ion quantum systems. 🔗https://bit.ly/4vgq7Wt @ucsbengineering.bsky.social @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social
The @uofcalifornia.bsky.social has officially secured the #1 spot in the nation for U.S. utility patents!🚀🥼 With 571 patents granted in 2025, UC generates nearly twice as many inventions as the second-place university. Full story: ow.ly/j8VU50Yx5Hg #winning #up
UC is No. 1 in patents in new U.S. ranking
UC is No. 1 in a National Academy of Inventors ranking of U.S. schools granted the most U.S. utility patents released today, March 19. Patents are a key driver of economic success and quality of life.
ow.ly
The future of quantum is being built right here in the OCAQπ Lab!⚛️✨ Last Friday, March 13, @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social hosted "Quantum California" – bringing together state leaders and industry icons to explore the groundbreaking research happening in our department ⚡️🥼
It’s March, and high school seniors are facing a huge choice: Where to call home for the next 4 years? 🎓 At @ucsbengineering.bsky.social, we offer elite #engineering research in a coastal environment designed to keep you inspired. 🌴🌊 #collegedecisions #ECE #UCSB
Congratulations to ECE & Materials Distinguished Professor Steven DenBaars for receiving the 2026 @optica.org Nick Holonyak, Jr. Award! 🏆💡 Read more about this prestigious honor: bit.ly/4lj15RH #UCSB #Engineering #Optica #LED #Sustainability #GaN
Silicon, the material behind computer chips, plays to the strengths of the trillion-dollar semiconductor industry. Researchers at #UCSB have identified a new qubit in silicon, called the CN center, which can bridge the gap between quantum science & scalable technology: https://ow.ly/LGZ450Yn4np
A robust new telecom qubit in silicon
Researchers in Chris Van de Walle’s group discover a more durable defect for quantum applications
ow.ly
I’m pleased to share that I've been selected as a Fellow of the 2026 Thinking About Thinking Program! I’m grateful to join a global, research-led ecosystem engaging thoughtfully with how AI is developed, governed, and understood. @geometric-intel.bsky.social @ai-ucsb.bsky.social