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Advancing AI and optimization for embedded intelligence.
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The National Science Foundation has awarded TILOS $15 million over five years to launch Phase II of the Institute, which officially begins November 1, 2026. Led by UC San Diego, with Brown University joining continuing partners MIT, National University, Penn, UT Austin, and Yale, Phase II broadens our focus from learning-enabled optimization to intelligent systems that learn, reason, coordinate, and operate in the physical world.
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TILOS Seminar Series
Nicklas Hansen: What Makes a Good World Model?
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Nicklas Hansen, a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Courant and a UC San Diego and TILOS alum, will present a data-centric take on world models, from TD-MPC2, which lets robots learn new skills directly in the real world, to why “hallucination” in world models is first and foremost a data coverage problem.
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026 | 11:00am-12:00pm PDT
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Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and Zoom
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The Vernor Vinge Lecture Series on the Future of AI and Society
Upcoming Lectures
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| Blaise Agüera y Arcas is an author, AI researcher, and Vice President and Fellow at Google, where he is CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). In 2025 he was appointed to the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2026 | 4:00-5:30pm PST
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Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego
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Benjamin Levinstein is an alignment researcher at Anthropic and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2026 | 4:00-5:30pm PST
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Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego
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The series kicked off on October 16 with award-winning science fiction author Ted Chiang. In his talk, “No Machine Has Passed the Turing Test,” Chiang shared his perspective on what Alan Turing actually meant by a thinking machine. Thank you to everyone who joined us!
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Co-hosted by TILOS and the UC San Diego School of Arts and Humanities, the series honors professor and science fiction author Vernor Vinge, who earned his PhD in mathematics from UC San Diego in 1971 and went on to popularize the idea of the technological singularity, the moment machine intelligence outpaces our own.
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TILOS Members + Research in the News
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TILOS Director Yusu Wang applies geometry and topology to find the structure buried in complex data, whether that’s the branching form of a neuron or the inner workings of a generative AI model. A new UC San Diego Today profile follows her path from computer graphics to some of AI’s biggest open questions, and how she leads TILOS’s work bridging AI and optimization in chip design, robotics, and networks. Read the full story.
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Dr. Shatha Jawad of National University received the 2026 ACBSP Teaching Excellence Award – Region 7 (Baccalaureate/Graduate Degree Category), which recognizes educators who demonstrate outstanding teaching excellence and a strong commitment to student learning and professional development. Region 7 (Western Council) spans institutions across 13 western states and territories (AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, ID, MP, MT, NV, OR, UT, WA, and WY), making this a highly competitive regional honor. Read the full story.
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TILOS team member David Z. Pan is the Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at UT Austin. His work on AI-driven chip design includes DREAMPlace, an open-source placement tool used in industry that can speed up chip placement by as much as 40 times, and MAGICAL, which automates analog circuit layout. Read the full story.
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A new NSF LEVEL UP AI workshop report, Designing AI Curriculum Pathways, co-authored by TILOS Associate Director for Education Jodi Reeves, offers a framework for building undergraduate AI programs. It identifies eight foundational knowledge areas, from mathematical foundations and machine learning to generative AI and human-centered AI and ethics, and poses seven questions to guide program design. Read the full story.
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TILOS Foundations team member Misha Belkin and affiliate faculty David Danks are two of six Senior Fellows in the fifth cohort of AI2050, the Schmidt Sciences initiative supporting research on the hard problems AI must solve to benefit society. Belkin will study the hidden internal mechanisms behind complex AI behavior to help researchers understand, monitor, and steer advanced systems, while Danks will examine how human values and AI systems shape each other over time. Read the full story.
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TILOS Robotics team member Nikolay Atanasov, head of the Existential Robotics Laboratory at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, is leading a newly expanded research collaboration with San Diego-based Brain Corp on semantic mapping and contextual grounding, the 3D spatial understanding that Atanasov argues remains essential for robust autonomy as robots move into complex, dynamic real-world environments. Read the full story.
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TILOS Robotics team co-lead Henrik Christensen argues in ETF Stream that the real winners from AI won’t be the hyperscalers whose data centers he expects to face huge overcapacity, but the companies embedding compressed, efficient models into watches, vacuum cleaners, wheelchairs, and robots as embodied AI spreads into factories and homes over the next decade. Read the full story.
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