The focus of the UC San Diego Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and Security(MICS)  is pioneering the next era of AI revolution by deeply integrating hardware, software, and data. Moving beyond traditional machine learning, our work focuses on the full lifecycle of modern intelligent systems—from the development and efficient deployment of massive generative foundation models and large language models (LLMs), to iteratively leveraging AI (which itself is fueled by the hardware capabilities itself) to dramatically accelerate chip design, to the rigorous validation of AI outputs through proofs of provenance and computation. We are fundamentally re-architecting computing stacks to support these data-intensive models, and using data-intensive models to make better compute systems, ensuring that training and inference can scale intelligently from the cloud to the most resource-constrained edge devices.

Our innovations directly enable the new wave of physically embedded intelligence, where intelligent agentic-based decision-making must occur in the real world with physical constraints and just in-time within physical embodiments such as drones, medical devices, and autonomous systems. We lead in agentic, automated performance optimization that adapts across diverse platforms and have pioneered the safe training and execution of deep learning-based networks directly on edge devices. Furthermore, our holistic approach to cyber-physical systems integrates advances in privacy-preserving computation and verifiable AI to secure these agents against adversarial threats, ensuring that the deployment of generative models in the physical world is both robust and trustworthy.

Recent News


Electrical engineer selected to lead Intel AI project

Electrical engineer selected to lead Intel AI project

December 7, 2020

Farinaz Koushanfar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, has been selected by Intel to lead one of nine inaugural research projects for the Private AI Collaborative Research Institute. Full Story


CleaNN: unsupervised, embedded defense against neural Trojan attacks

CleaNN: unsupervised, embedded defense against neural Trojan attacks

November 25, 2020

Engineers at UC San Diego have developed a new defense against neural network Trojan attacks on autonomous devices such as cars, drones, or security cameras. Their algorithm and hardware co-designed solution is the first end-to-end framework that enables the online real time mitigation of these Trojan attacks for embedded deep neural network algorithms. Full Story


UC San Diego COVID-19 Forecast Now Part of CDC Model

UC San Diego COVID-19 Forecast Now Part of CDC Model

October 30, 2020

A computational model that forecasts the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States as a whole and in each state, which was developed by a team of researchers from the University of California San Diego and Northeastern University, is now part of the national mortality forecast issued by the Centers for Disease Control.   Full Story


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