From the waves to the redwoods, it's all happening here.

Visit the IAS, UCSC’s premier art galleries, for our spring exhibitions. On view April 10–August 16, 2026 are three diverse and interdisciplinary shows: Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right , the first US solo exhibition by the Colombia-based artist and medical doctor; Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj , a site-specific and immersive exploration of the Haitian kreyol conception of rasanblaj; and Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies , a mixed-media exhibition emerging at the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and visual art. The IAS Galleries are open Wednesday-Sunday, 12 pm – 5 pm. Admission is free to the public. Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right Libia Posada’s first solo exhibition in the United States features installations, sculptures, and drawings meticulously constructed from surgical instruments, gauze bandages, crutches, used books, and domestic picture frames. The new and existing works in the exhibition powerfully stitch together the personal, social, and political disorders and afflictions that currently trouble the world, from the wars that resonate across the globe to the violences of aging in US prisons. Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements The internationally-lauded work of humanities professor Gina Athena Ulysse is on view as a premier Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. The site-specific installation, produced in community from things collected, found, purchased and donated, centers on the Haitian concept of rasanblaj, a form of assembly and collage that transcends the formal use of materials to draw together people, spirits, and ideas. Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies Collage is both a material practice and a structural interrogation in the Faculty Spotlight Exhibition artworks by literature professor Ronaldo V. Wilson. In video, painting, and installation, layers and folds conceal and reveal, delving into the experience, both bodily and emotive, of living in time

While large language models can match or exceed human performance, they do so with memory and energy costs orders of magnitude greater than biological cognition. We investigate sparsity as a brain-inspired computational principle to address both. We first establish a framework for evaluating small language model construction methods, using the next-token logit distribution as a behavioral fingerprint. Then, we introduce a semi-structured correlation-aware weight sparsity (CWS) method that uses the full activation covariance to identify and prune correlated weights whose combined removal cost is lower than any individual score predicts. CWS, improves perplexity over existing criteria up to 70% sparsity. To extend this gain to extreme sparsity, we propose a hierarchical ADMM framework that optimizes pruning directly against cross-entropy and distillation loss, first layer-wise for efficiency and then globally for cross-layer coordination. This research establishes brain-inspired principles as a foundation for efficient language models that remain accurate even under extreme compression. Event Host: Kimia Gholami, Ph.D. Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering Advisor: Jason Eshraghian Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/9827512398?pwd=SGpDWGtVVG81dkgyTHhjbG81dEVUZz09&omn=98349793611 Passcode: 8398