University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public research university and one of ten campuses in the University of California system. Founded in 1965 and situated on 2,001 acres of forested hills overlooking Monterey Bay, UCSC has grown into a prominent research institution with approximately 19,000 students and around 4,465 employees including roughly 600 faculty. UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering is the primary home for AI research at the university. The school hosts the Vision, Learning, and Assured Autonomy (VLAA) Lab, co-led by Assistant Professor Cihang Xie and Professor Yuyin Zhou, which conducts research at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and AI safety. The lab's work includes adversarial robustness (defending neural networks from adversarial attacks), robustness under distribution shifts, deep representation learning, safety evaluation for vision-language models, and red-teaming autonomous systems. Recent work has explored environmental indirect prompt injection attacks against embodied AI systems, examining how misleading text in physical environments can hijack autonomous decision-making. Open Philanthropy has provided multiple rounds of funding to UCSC for this line of research: an initial grant of $265,000 over three years and a subsequent $114,000 grant to support graduate students in Professor Xie's lab. These grants fall under Open Philanthropy's focus area of potential risks from advanced AI. The university also operates a Generative AI Center focused on exploring, understanding, and shaping generative AI, and hosts several student AI organizations including Santa Cruz AI and the Autonomy Club. UCSC's annual operating budget is approximately $1 billion, with research funding comprising a significant share via contracts, grants, and private philanthropy.