AI in Action: Miguel Eckstein & Arpit Gupta
Discover how artificial intelligence is reshaping both modern computing and human cognition in the fourth installment of UCSB Library’s new speaker series, AI in Action: Conversations with UCSB Researchers. This event features short presentations by Miguel Eckstein (Psychological & Brain Sciences) and Arpit Gupta (Computer Science) on innovative applications of AI in their research, followed by a 30-minute moderated discussion on broader trends, challenges, and ethical considerations.
Even when casually looking around, humans make three to four eye movements per second without conscious thought. For generations, scientists have wondered if these automatic gaze patterns serve a particular purpose. In his presentation titled “Why We Look Where We Look: How AI Answered an Age-Old Human Mystery,” Eckstein will reveal how building human visual traits into an artificial intelligence agent helped solve this long-standing puzzle. He will share how AI trained to comprehend scenes naturally mirrored human viewing habits, proving that our everyday gaze is actually an optimal strategy to quickly process the world around us.
The Internet shapes nearly every part of modern life, yet keeping it performant, fair, and reliable remains surprisingly hard. In his presentation titled “Making the ‘Net’ Work in the Agentic Era,” Gupta will discuss how his team uses AI to accelerate networking research, inform broadband policy, and move toward networks that run themselves.
This event may be photographed or recorded.
Advance registration is recommended as space is limited.
About the Speakers
Dr. Miguel Eckstein is the Mellichamp Chair in Mind and Machine Intelligence and Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UC Santa Barbara. He has published over 200 articles relating to computational human vision, visual attention, search, perceptual learning, and the perception of medical images. His research uses behavioral, neuroscience, and computational methods to uncover how humans see.
Dr. Arpit Gupta is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara and a Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research spans production-ready self-driving networks (AIOps) and data-driven policymaking. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Google Research Scholar Award, the Benton Opportunity Fellowship, and the UC Presidential Faculty Fellowship, along with multiple Applied Networking Research Prizes and best-paper awards at top networked systems conferences (IMC, NSDI, CCS, etc.).
About AI in Action
AI in Action: Conversations with UCSB Researchers aims to foster an open, interdisciplinary community exploring how AI can deepen understanding, expand access to knowledge, and inspire new forms of scholarship. The speaker series showcases how UC Santa Barbara researchers are using innovative applications of AI, from accelerating materials science and environmental modeling to uncovering new insights in language, art, and history. Each session includes presentations by UCSB faculty and research teams on how AI tools and methods are shaping their work, followed by discussion on broader trends, challenges, and ethical considerations.
AI in Action is co-led by UCSB Library and the UCSB AI Community of Practice (CoP), AI for Research Special Interest Group, with support from the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, Office of Research, Office of Teaching and Learning, Marine Science Institute, and National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.
