Research

Generative AI: A New World

As ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) come to the fore, corporate leaders are realizing the tremendous impact of this revolutionary technology. What will generative AI mean for your company and your industry? UCSB researchers — longtime leaders in fields such as data management, organizational transformation, user experience, technology risk mitigation and job redesign — can help you get answers. Learn more about how working with UCSB can set your company on the path to its own organizational revolution.

Mitigating the AI Risk

The rapid integration of chatbots, LLMs and generative AI into many aspects of modern life and business has raised concern about the responsible use of these technologies. UCSB’s Center For Responsible Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Group are leaders in conducting research and developing talent to address issues of fairness, bias, privacy, transparency and accountability arising in the context of AI algorithms. Let the experts at UCSB help you understand your options and responsibilities.

AI and Cybersecurity

The National Science Foundation–funded AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and OperatioN (ACTION) supports a bold vision. For the first time, humans and AI agents are partnering to defend critical infrastructure against ever-changing, increasingly sophisticated security threats. The ACTION Institute brings together universities, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and industry to build those systems while training the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

Reducing AI Information Overload

Addressing grand challenges such as climate change requires data, but finding the right information in the exponentially expanding sea of digital data can be overwhelming. That’s why researchers at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management are developing a scalable, widely accessible, easy-to-navigate platform driven by AI and synthesis science, which involves pulling new insights from existing data sets to benefit a wide range of environmentally focused users. Insights, technology, data and funding from our corporate partners can provide indispensable support for this important effort.

Researchers in UCSB’s renowned program in structural materials respond to the global need for new high-performance materials in the full range of applications. Strong collaborations across departments, and partnerships with such industry giants as Pratt & Whitney, characterize the approach, which includes designing, fabricating, characterizing and testing novel materials and has resulted in rich, strong and long-lived industry partnerships.

Making, Characterizing, Testing

UCSB materials scientists employ wide-ranging advanced techniques to create, characterize and test structural materials and composites for application in the automotive, aerospace, energy, and other strategic application spaces. Their work is enabled by an unusually impressive and diverse collection of shared state-of-the-art instruments, such as the powerful TriBeam scanning electron microscope. Invented by materials professor Tresa Pollock and recently commercialized by ThermoFisher Scientific, the TriBeam enables high-speed visual reconstructions of three-dimensional material microstructures and demonstrates the forward thinking, the innovative spirit, and the solution-centered nature of UCSB structural materials.

The quantum realm is coming. In some ways, it’s already here. Preparing your company for the future requires knowing the ropes of the quantum realm. The experts at UCSB, which was selected to house the first National Science Foundation Quantum Foundry, can help you get up to quantum speed.

The Future… Now

Currently, quantum computers are used as specialized benchmarking tools for specified tasks, but science, technology and engineering will eventually advance enough to enable practical quantum computers and other quantum-enabled technologies. These include quantum processors capable of solving complex optimization problems for businesses, running algorithms for new materials and drug discovery, improving the accuracy and forecasting for climate trends; and quantum sensors (see below). Engaging with the experts at UCSB — such partnerships being a pillar of the Foundry mission — can give your company a critical competitive advantage in the coming quantum era.

Cryptography and Security

Data security is not a new concern, but it is a growing one in our cyber-connected world. Both classic techniques and quantum mechanics are being used at UCSB to create algorithms to encrypt data so that it is secure not only now, but also against attack by a future quantum computer. Now is the time to engage with UCSB researchers to understand quantum encryption and how it can work for you.

Making Quantum Sens(ors)

Quantum sensors will enable unprecedented capabilities in precision timing, navigation, and global mapping applications, including those used to map variations in Earth’s magnetic fields. They will undoubtedly be used to better synchronize remote clocks in a global network, which is important for the accuracy of GPS. Quantum technology will also likely be used in wave sensors that make the world’s most precise length measurements, including those of the Earth’s gravitational field. If your company is considering where quantum sensing will go, UCSB researchers can help.

Industry partnerships complement UCSB’s many government-funded centers and institutes that are focused on these two important fields. For instance, the BioPACIFIC MIP is a one-of-a-kind user facility dedicated to creating a nexus for synthetic biology and materials, with the goal of revolutionizing high-performance polymers. The bulk of the platform activity is devoted to designing and developing unique automated materials-synthesis and characterization capabilities.

The Materials Research Laboratory

Widely recognized as one of the top five materials research facilities in the world, since 1993 the MRL has received seven consecutive rounds of multi-year funding as an NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). The MRL thrives as an innovation engine for materials discoveries, as a host to important collaborative industry centers and as critical training ground for future scientific leaders. The high-impact research conducted in the MRL has long helped to shape the future of technology, the environment, and medicine.

Dow Materials Institute

Having provided more than $20 million in funding since it began in 2011, the Dow Materials Institute (DowMI) demonstrates the trust industry has in UCSB research. Since then, with the theme of “function by structural design,” Dow and UCSB researchers have collaborated on a variety of projects aimed at application areas ranging from next-generation microelectronics to high-performance polymers. The center enables the education and training of students and postdocs, and fosters their development in highly interdisciplinary teams both in the laboratory and through its support of students in UCSB’s annual New Venture Competition.

The Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials (MC-CAM)

Since 2001, through the MC-CAM partnership, Mitsubishi has donated nearly $70 million to UCSB. Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (MCC) evaluated universities world-wide and established the center at UCSB based on the excellence and breadth of its materials programs and its track record in interdisciplinary research. Roughly fifty UCSB researchers at any time — plus MCC researchers “embedded” at UCSB — have collaborated on a range of MC-CAM–funded projects focused on the areas of organic and hybrid organic-inorganic materials for electronic- and optical-device applications. These range from short-term single-investigator projects, to longer-term multi-investigator efforts. Your company can take advantage of this kind of high-level collaboration to generate findings critical to future success.

From inventing the blue LED to developing high-performance on-chip integrated lasers, transistors and circuits and creating the materials and the nanostructures that make those and many other technologies possible, UCSB faculty have long led the way in world-changing advances and focused intently on transferring revolutionary technologies to the market.

Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center (SLEEC)

This unique consortium linking academia and industry is all about LED-based technology. Whether engaged in first-principles research and modeling, creating computer simulations of new phenomena or designing and developing new technology on a solid-state lighting foundation, this center does it all. Your company, too, can collaborate with Nobel Laureate Shuji Nakamura, fellow SLEEC co-director Steven DenBaars, and their fellow world-leading faculty colleagues to address your company’s most challenging technical challenges.

Nanofabrication Facility

While traveling the nation to interview for faculty positions, one UCSB PhD graduate met a researcher who described the UCSB Nanofabrication Facility as “the Holy Grail of cleanrooms.” Join the more than fifty industrial users — from small local startups to giants like Google — that tap this one-of-a-kind facility and its expert staff to push the frontiers of micro-scale and nanoscale design. The “Nanofab,” as it is known, provides the supplies, facilities, equipment and know-how needed to accomplish your cutting-edge research.

AIM Photonics

The American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics) at UCSB offers access to services across the entire silicon photonics development cycle: Design, simulation, fabrication, packaging, validation, and a path to volume manufacturing. AIM researchers work with dozens of major partners in industry, government and academia. See how they can support your company in addressing critical challenges — at the speed of light.

Sustainability is the central existential challenge of our time and has, accordingly, driven global efforts to develop energy-wise technologies, to create sound evolving environmental policies and regulations, and has motivated businesses to work in ways that will ensure the future of our planet. This sustainability-centric operating environment creates real challenges for businesses of all sizes. UCSB is home to numerous experts who conduct the kind of research that can help you in your work to be both a thriving business and a good corporate citizen.

Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE)

Since it was established in 2008, the IEE has become a juggernaut of collaborative interdisciplinary innovation where more than one hundred affiliated researchers from diverse disciplines and perspectives combine efforts and expertise to innovate for the future. Working in three main focus areas — Smart Societal Infrastructure, Energy Efficient Computing and Communications, and the Food-Energy-Water Nexus — IEE serves as a crucial center for groundbreaking gains in energy efficiency.

Bren School of Environmental Science & Management

The Bren School provides a perfect example of the power of multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving. Faculty who are experts in the natural sciences, economics, political science, computational and data science, business and law provide graduate students with a well-rounded understanding of how to pursue market-based solutions to environmental problems. For the capstone master’s group projects, students work together for a year to solve problems for a range of clients, from non-profits to multinational corporations, who might need to meet a new regulation, manage key resources more effectively, or simply better align their enterprise with important twenty-first century environmental concerns.

Green Chemistry

Researchers at UCSB are keenly engaged in reducing the environmental impacts of chemical processes and products. For example, lab groups are working to create new nanostructures for light harvesting in more efficient, longer-lasting and inexpensive solar cells. They are investigating how to reuse the long-carbon-chain polymers in plastics, and they are developing high-powered LED lasers specifically to make an energy-intensive catalytic process more efficient, perhaps to make hydrogen fuel cheaply without emissions.