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


The AI Revolution is Upon Us--And UC San Diego Researchers Are Using it to Inform Climate Action

The AI Revolution is Upon Us--And UC San Diego Researchers Are Using it to Inform Climate Action

May 2, 2023

Researchers across a range of fields are working together to develop and implement AI-assisted tools and machine learning methods that will enable scientific discoveries at an unprecedented pace. And when it comes to global challenges like climate change, time is of the essence. Full Story


Fixing the Chicken-and-Egg Conundrum of Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations

Fixing the Chicken-and-Egg Conundrum of Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations

April 7, 2023

The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering launched a new effort to help seed research collaborations between labs. The program is called the Jacobs School Early Career Faculty Development Award. It provides funding that pays for graduate students from two different labs to begin the collaborations. Full Story


UC San Diego Computer Security and Privacy Pioneer Named ACM Fellow

UC San Diego Computer Security and Privacy Pioneer Named ACM Fellow

January 23, 2023

Farinaz Koushanfar, a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego, has been named one of 57 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for 2022. Koushanfar is recognized for her contributions to secure computing and privacy-preserving machine learning.  Full Story


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