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

Games user researchers (GURs) use various methods to understand when a game is overloading its players. In games research where data-driven multimodal approaches are necessary to drive insights, the currently available tools to measure user load are coarse, one-dimensional, and often aggregated. The more dominant instruments, such as the Cognitive Load Scale (CLS) and the NASA-TLX, rely on player reflections of mental effort, primarily at the end of the playtest session, to distinguish different cognitive load types. This makes it difficult to: (1) understand where specifically players are struggling and experiencing high load, especially at the non-reflective subconscious level, (2) identify where that load is primarily coming from (e.g., perceptual clutter or difficulty/skill imbalance), and (3) examine user overload at scale, a crucial component of designing a game with large player bases. Telemetry is the behavioral record of what players are doing from moment to moment, in varying degrees of granularity. Telemetry has served as a powerful tool to understand player behaviors at scale, yet is rarely used to measure user load, especially through a validated multidimensional framework. This dissertation proposes that behavioral signatures of specific load constructs are observable in game telemetry, and a model built and validated on such telemetry can measure the distinct components of each load at the moment-to-moment granularity of individual play, as opposed to aggregated magnitude. This dissertation consists of three parts: (1) Validation through construct manipulation and reference measurement. Specifically, manipulating theoretically grounded load constructs and confirming that the proposed telemetry features respond as predicted, relative to the established measurements collected alongside them (e.g., NASA-TLX, pupillometry, secondary-task). (2) Individual-level validation through rigorous longitudinal examination of the same players repeatedly across many

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

Join us Wednesday, May 21st from 12:00 PM- 1:00 PM at California Coffee for an informative and uplifting workshop you won't want tfor suo miss! Our featured guest speaker, Manas S. Kshirsagar, AD, MS a NAMA Board Certified Ayurvedic Doctor with years of experience in holistic wellness and healing, will be presenting "Tools for Stress and Anxiety". With today's fast-paced world and the stress levels many of us are unduring, this workshop will offer valuable insight, practical tools and wellness strategies to help bring more balance, peace and calm into our daily lives. Lunch Special Available: Half Sandwich + Chips just $9.99 California Coffee, 9105 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA 95003 cacoffeeaptos.com Thank you from myself Sylvia Reyes, and my amazing team for supporting our small business and community events!

Time series data with dependence arise across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, often presenting challenging inferential problems related to structural change and clustering. This Ph.D. proposal addresses several related problems in statistical inference for multivariate and network-indexed time series. First, we develop a weighted multivariate $U$-statistic procedure for detecting a single changepoint in the mean of a multivariate stationary time series. The proposed framework accommodates short-range dependence, encompasses classical CUSUM and Wilcoxon tests as special cases, and admits a tractable limiting distribution after a pre-whitening transformation. Second, we study nodal clustering in graphs with dynamic attributes through a decoder-only latent space framework that integrates temporal dynamics and structural information via a graph-fused LASSO regularization. An extension of this framework, in which the neural network decoder is replaced by an autoregressive structure at each node, is also introduced. Lastly, a future research project is proposed on modeling and changepoint inference for Arctic sea ice coverage data, whose marginal distribution is doubly inflated with point masses at zero and one. A latent Gaussian process transformation approach is outlined that accommodates this exotic marginal structure while permitting temporal and spatial autocorrelation, trends, and seasonal dynamics. In tandem, these efforts aim to provide flexible and theoretically grounded tools for analyzing complex dependent data. Event Host: Xi Chen, Ph.D. Student, Statistical Science Advisor: Robert Lund Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97760514185?pwd=ImfeI5uEdBvq9eoiFXnF5pecmwfVHd.1 Passcode: 333103

When: Thursday, July 23 Time: 12:00 PM -1:00 PM Where: Register for the Zoom link . The workshop will be recorded, and a link to the recording will be sent out after the first session. Whether you’re walking at lunch, lifting weights after work, training for your first 5K, or simply trying to stay active, what you eat can make a noticeable difference in how you feel, perform, and recover. We will explore the fundamentals of how to nourish your body for fitness without restrictive diets or complicated meal plans. In this workshop, you will learn how to: Time meals and snacks around workouts for sustained energy Build balanced meals using carbohydrates, protein, and healthy fats Avoid common nutrition myths that can hinder progress

This exhibition brings together a range of analog games – including board, card, role-playing, and other participatory works – that engage social and political realities in different ways. The works span widely circulated commercial games to independently produced projects, one-of-a-kind artworks by artists, faculty, alumni, and students, and materials drawn from UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives. In part, the exhibition challenges the persistent assumption that games and play are detached from social and political life. On the contrary, game designers and artists across diverse perspectives and positions have long used play to engage questions of social systems, lived experience, and how power operates. This exhibition does not attempt to represent that full spectrum. Instead, it brings together a particular set of works that foreground how games can make systems visible, intervene in them, and imagine alternatives. All games embody values, whether intentional or not. – Mary Flanagan , game designer and scholar Across all of these works, games are not only forms of entertainment, though they may be that as well. They are encountered in multiple ways: as objects, as systems, as artworks, and as experiences that unfold unpredictably through interaction. In each case, rules and constraints shape what participants can do. In these different forms, the works stage systems – such as housing and land ownership, capitalism, race and identity, civil rights and protest, fascism, and colonialism – in ways that are simplified and easy to see, opening space to recognize similar structures beyond the game. In this sense, the works suggest that rules are not neutral – they organize experience, distribute power, and produce meaning. Games are the art of agency. – C. Thi Nguyen , philosopher The exhibition is intentionally dense. This abundance reflects the breadth of ways games operate across contexts, from activism and education to art and everyday life. While it cel

Join us Wednesday, May 21st from 12:00 PM- 1:00 PM at California Coffee for an informative and uplifting workshop you won't want tfor suo miss! Our featured guest speaker, Manas S. Kshirsagar, AD, MS a NAMA Board Certified Ayurvedic Doctor with years of experience in holistic wellness and healing, will be presenting "Tools for Stress and Anxiety". With today's fast-paced world and the stress levels many of us are unduring, this workshop will offer valuable insight, practical tools and wellness strategies to help bring more balance, peace and calm into our daily lives. Lunch Special Available: Half Sandwich + Chips just $9.99 California Coffee, 9105 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA 95003 cacoffeeaptos.com Thank you from myself Sylvia Reyes, and my amazing team for supporting our small business and community events!

Join Career Success for an interactive workshop on Interview Best Practices, followed by Mock Interview Practice! Note: You must Register via Zoom for this event. Once registered, make sure to add the event to your calendar. We will provide captions for the presentation. If you have disability-related needs, please contact the Career Success office at [email protected] as soon as possible. YOU BELONG HERE Programs and services are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities. To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

Three learners who fail the same level of an educational game the same number of times can be failing in three different ways, and the difference determines what each should do next. Yet the measures a game’s logs are usually reduced to (completion time, error counts, mastery estimates) render the three identical. This proposal takes one breakdown as its object: failure-to-adapt, the case where the game has repeatedly surfaced evidence that a learner’s current approach is failing and the learner’s approach shows no responsive change. The construct is grounded in Winne and Hadwin’s monitor-and-control model of self-regulated learning and defined at the level of the learner’s plan. To detect it, a plan-recognition engine maintains a continuously updated probability estimate of which strategy the learner is executing across the whole trace; an episode is flagged when that estimate shows no evidence-responsive revision. Because behavior alone cannot settle what broke down, flagged episodes are validated against learners’ own verbal reports, coded blind, and decomposed into monitoring failure, control failure, or control the trace cannot show. Three studies carry the work: detection and diagnosis on real telemetry from an educational game, including a comparison against the analytics the field already runs; a formative study of what a facilitator (an instructor or teaching assistant running a class play session) must see to judge correctly which learners need attention; and a documented authoring case carrying the detection to a second game. The contribution is knowledge for game-based-learning researchers: a theory-grounded construct, a validated way to detect it from play, and the authoring knowledge to embed that detection in new games. Event Host: Jiahong Li, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media Advisor: Magy Seif El-Nasr Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93238603235?pwd=zENRsu82HRj4JYKcMEn9MZibU8kC7F.1 Passcode: 835328

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